Emma did not die in her car the night she lost control and rolled several times. She spent 10 days in intensive care where, initially little hope was given to her parents.
“I had a doctor tell me about a week and a half, two weeks after (the accident), ‘Jill, you know that your daughter will never, ever, ever be the same?’ And I looked him in the eye and said, ‘You know, you don’t really know that. And my faith lies in someone much larger than you. And He’s the only one that knows the end of Emma’s story’. And those words just came. And that doctor never forgot that,” said Jill, Emma’s mom.
“It might sound strange and I know that some of our reactions to some of your questions about some of the things that have happened in our lives might sound out of the ordinary to most people. We were pretty calm about it. This is what the Lord was doing and I accepted that,” Emma’s dad, Larry said.
Emma had barely a scratch on her…but on the inside, she had suffered a traumatic brain injury. They spent seven months at a children’s hospital where Emma came out of the coma, slowly began her recovery and eventually started therapy.
“There was one night I remember that, Emma was supposed to have a shower. Emma needed a shower and it was “her night” to have a shower. And it just destroyed me. I thought, ‘My daughter needs a shower. How big a deal is that? Can we just give her a shower?’ And I went out in the lobby and wailed in a corner by myself,” Jill recalls. “It was hard but I stayed in her room and we’d get her settled down for the night and I’d have my Bible and I’d just open it up and He always had something for me.”
Slowly, through her recovery there were glimmers of new life.
“I’d sit by Emma’s bed and ask her, ‘Can you talk to me? Can you talk to Mom? Can you look at me, Emma? Look at Mom.’ And she couldn’t even make her… but I knew she was there. We had been working with a therapist that had a strip with the alphabet on it and Emma would put her thumb down with the letter.”
Emma’s brain damage did not steal her capability of being able to communicate entirely. Though she cannot use speech, she and her mom slowly worked out an extraordinary system. Emma blinks to the letters of the alphabet that are split into four rows. Her mom counts the rows, Emma blinks to the row the letter is in that she needs and she is able to fluently and quite quickly spell out words, thus forming sentences.
Emma, through her mom, says, “When they are hurting there is nothing too powerful for God to overcome.”
She does not blame God nor is she angry with Him… through everything she has been through in these last seven years, she only expresses her love for Jesus Christ.
Pastor Steve Kuno, Valley Christian Center says, “The thing I’ve seen most about their faith during this whole deal is they’ve been rock solid. Their faith has never wavered. They’ve always depended upon the Lord in every turn and it’s been a huge testimony to our church. They always knew that His word was true and they held on to it. They never let go of the promises of God.” He goes on to say, “I think a lot of times we have to remember that the Bible says the rain falls on the just and unjust. And a lot of times we wonder why God would allow those things but we have to remember that God is a good God. He has done so much good for us and a lot of times we put the blame on the wrong person.”
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