The Smell of Rain

A cold March wind danced around the dead of
night in Dallas as the Doctor walked into the
small hospital room of Diana Blessing. Still
groggy from surgery, her husband David held her
hand as they braced themselves for the latest
news. That afternoon of March 10,1991,
complications had forced Diana, only 24 weeks
pregnant, to Danae Lu Blessing.
At 12 inches long and weighing only one pound
and nine ounces, they already knew she was
perilously premature.

Still, the doctor’s soft words dropped like bombs.
I don’t think she’s going to make it, he said, as
kindly as he could. “There’s only a 10 percent
chance she will live through the night, and even
then, if by some slim chance she does make it,
her future could be a very cruel one.” Numb with
disbelief, David and Diana listened as the doctor
described the devastating problems Danae would
likely face if she survived. She would never walk,
she would never talk, she would probably be
blind, and she would certainly be prone to other
catastrophic conditions from cerebral palsy to
complete mental retardation, and on and on.
“No! No!” was all Diana could say. She and
David, with their 5-year-old son Dustin, had long
dreamed of the day they would have a daughter
to become a family of four. Now, within a matter
of hours, that dream was slipping away.
Through the dark hours of morning as Danae
held onto life by the thinnest thread, Diana
slipped in and out of sleep, growing more and
more determined that their tiny daughter would
live, and live to be a healthy, happy young girl.
But David, fully awake and listening to additional
dire details of their daughter’s chances of ever
leaving the hospital alive, much less healthy,
knew he must confront his wife with the
inevitable. David walked in and said that we
needed to talk about making funeral
arrangements. Diana remembers, ‘I felt so bad
for him because he was doing everything, trying
to include me in what was going on, but I just
wouldn’t listen, I couldn’t listen. I said, “No, that
is not going to happen, no way! I don’t care
what the doctors say; Danae is not going to die!
One day she will be just fine, and she will be
coming home with us!”
As if willed to live by Diana’s determination,
Danae clung to life hour after hour, with the help
of every medical machine and marvel her
miniature body could endure. But as those first
days passed, a new agony set in for David and
Diana. Because Danae’s under-developed
nervous system was essentially raw, the lightest
kiss or caress only intensified her discomfort, so
they couldn’t even cradle their tiny baby girl
against their chests to offer the strength of their
love. All they could do, as Danae struggled alone
beneath the ultraviolet light in the tangle of
tubes and wires, was to pray that God would
stay close to their precious little girl. There was
never a moment when Danae suddenly grew
stronger.
But as the weeks went by, she did slowly gain an
ounce of weight here and an ounce of strength
there. At last, when Danae turned two months
old, her parents were able to hold her in their
arms for the very first time. And two months
later-though doctors continued to gently but
grimly warn that her chances of surviving, much
less living any kind of normal life, were next to
zero. Danae went home from the hospital, just as
her mother had predicted.
Today, five years later, Danae is a petite but
feisty young girl with glittering gray eyes and an
unquenchable zest for life. She shows no signs,
what so ever, of any mental or physical
impairment. Simply, she is everything a little girl
can be and more-but that happy ending is far
from the end of her story.
One blistering afternoon in the summer of 1996
near her home in Irving, Texas, Danae was
sitting in her mother’s lap in the bleachers of a
local ballpark where her brother Dustin’s
baseball team was practicing. As always, Danae
was chattering non-stop with her mother and
several other adults sitting nearby when she
suddenly fell silent. Hugging her arms across her
chest, Danae asked, “Do you smell that?”
Smelling the air and detecting the approach of a
thunderstorm, Diana replied, “Yes, it smells like
rain.” Danae closed her eyes and again asked,
“Do you smell that?” Once again, her mother
replied, “Yes, I think we’re about to get wet, it
smells like rain. Still caught in the moment,
Danae shook her head, patted her thin shoulders
with her small hands and loudly announced, “No,
it smells like Him. It smells like God when you
lay your head on His chest.” Tears blurred
Diana’s eyes as Danae then happily hopped
down to play with the other children.
Before the rains came, her daughter’s words
confirmed what Diana and all the members of
the extended Blessing family had known, at least
in their hearts, all along. During those long days
and nights of her first two months of her life,
when her nerves were too sensitive for them to
touch her, God was holding Danae on His chest
and it is His loving scent that she remembers so well.