My apologies for minimal posting over the past 2 weeks. The usual NASA proposal deadline consumed a week, another week was spent at the annual family reunion picnic on July 5, and visiting Emily.

Emily is my 19 year old niece who is a sophomore at Houghton College, majoring in biology/pre-med. Her father is a Methodist minister, and like many Methodist ministers, was moving to a new church on the first week of June. Despite being long anticipated, it was difficult, it is always difficult to move, especially after 20 years. Little Goodwill Methodist church of Elverson had been a good church to them, though in its 150 years of existence, had had some 76 ministers living in the old farmhouse parsonage. Emily's father set the record for the longest tenure of any pastor, perhaps because his seven children and his one-acre garden fit so well in the farming community. But the Methodist heritage from Wesley is a Church run like an army, and ministers who aren't running million dollar operations are shuffled about like lieutenants on two year stints. So it was on a hot, sticky day in June that found Emily waiting for the afternoon thunderstorm to pass before carrying another box of books from the old white-plastered parsonage up the hill to the church. The rain passed by and Emily hurried through the wet grass under the large maple that shaded the yard, when a late-storm thunderbolt shattered the calm.

Her little brother ran inside, saying that Emily was playing dead. Her mother hurried outside and found her crumpled under the tree, burned clothing across her chest. Her father ran to start CPR, calling 9-11, but when the EMT arrived they could not get her shocked heart to start. Five, then ten minutes went by under their frantic attempts. They would have given up but for the fact she was 19 and in perfect health. Finally after 15 minutes of trying, her heart began to beat. I got the phone call while Emily was in the ambulance, and only found this out weeks later, but during that 15 minutes my whole family was gathered in the living room, praying. CS Lewis quotes an experienced Christian in his essay "The Efficacy of Prayer",

“I have seen many striking answers to prayer and more than one that I thought miraculous. But they usually come at the beginning: before conversion, or soon after it. As the Christian life proceeds, they tend to be rarer."

If the earnest prayer of a young Christian is what saved Emily's life, then it was my children, that summer evening, who successfully assaulted heaven.

That night the CBS3 Philadelphia affiliate carried the newstory entitled, "A Chester County teen is fighting for her life after being struck by a bolt of lightning",  and fight she did. Once the emergency room technicians had "stabilized" her with ventilator, intravenous, oxygen, and sedatives, the ICU could begin to assess the damage. The lightning had entered at her shoulder and left at her hip, leaving nasty burns across her chest. The high voltage of the discharge had passed directly through her heart, shorting out the "pacemaker" cells that keep the heart beating. Fortunately, however, most of the electric current had gone through her clothing, so there wasn't a great deal of internal damage. Within two days, the heart specialist told us, her heart was up and running normally, though she was still in a coma.

The brain specialist wasn't so encouraging. An MRI brain scan revealed that only 60% of her brain was "active", the lower brain stem that controls the muscles of the body having taken most of the hit, either from the lightning or the subsequent lack of oxygen. That's why her body was as limp as a rag doll, so that a machine in the corner of her ICU room sighed softly, pumping air into her lungs at regular intervals. The brain specialist was old school, never giving more hope than medically permissible. "I've only had two other lightning cases in my career," he said, "but I'd give her only a 5% chance of recovering."

We waited, as the days turned into weeks, alternatively praying and hoping for some sign of consciousness. Her parents camped out in the hospital burn unit in their yellow plastic disposable scrubs, anxiously stroking her hands and unresponsive face. With the internet the news of Emily spread quickly. Churches from Illinois to Afghanistan were praying for her recovery. A Facebook account quickly collected 2000 friends.  Overwhelmed with phone calls and e-mails, her sister began a web blog (requires registration), with each small change excitedly noted: she clenched her fist on July 3rd,  she began breathing without the ventilator on July 9th, she coughed and wiggled her toes on July 17th.

Coming off the ventilator was an important step, and meant that she could be transferred from ICU to a rehab hospital. Yet there remained many skeptics, among whom is the hoped-for Albert Einstein Moss Rehab unit, who don't think she will recover. No one says the dreaded words, but the underlying sentiment is as clear as if spoken, "Unplug her.  It's a needless emotional drain, and a senseless financial drain, you are ruining your health to spend your days anxiously at her side." A country that declared Terri Schiavo in a "persistent vegatative state" has no patience for basket cases, has no hope for recovery, has no belief in miracles.

"But," as I told my distraught children, "if God had wanted to take her, He would have had the lightning penetrate her skin, He would have had it strike her on the head. But He didn't. He heard our prayers. He preserved her life. Then He must have a plan for Emily, perhaps even a plan to undo the curse of Terri." So we drove the 850 miles to be at Emily's side, before joining the rest of the family reunion. We arrived at the hospital, donned our disposable aprons and latex gloves, and passed through the guarded gates of the burn unit in the permitted visitor pairs. Emily lay motionless under the sheet, the pressure cuffs around her legs inflating periodically to circulate blood, a large padded collar around her neck to hold her head straight and permit the ventilator and feeding tubes to pass through the tracheostomy in her throat. A glowing red light on her finger monitored her blood oxygen, and arm cuff monitored her blood pressure, all displayed on an old-fashioned CRT monitor over her head.

"Hello Emily", we said, as I fished out of my pocket the bottle of Holy Water I had smuggled into the burn unit. "We've come to pray with you." and her heart rate and blood pressure spiked upwards on the monitor and her eyelids opened to reveal eyes staring fixedly at the ceiling. "Its your brain motor control circuits that aren't working" I told her, "but like a little baby you will have to learn them all over again. It will be hard work, but cheer up, it isn't everyone that gets an opportunity to be born again." We doused her head with water, and prayed, but in far too short a time the nurse came by to tell us that she needed to give her a sponge bath and that our time was up. While the nurse rolled her onto her side and rearranged the pillows, I asked her about Emily. "Em's doing great!" she said, "That's what I call her, since I have a 20-year named Emily and I call her Em. Em's made friends with everyone in the ward. We can tell when she doesn't like something, she sort of curls her lip."

Despite all her handicaps, Emily was communicating! Which isn't all that surprising, since there are many things science has not yet begun to understand. For example, you know when someone is staring at the back of your head, even in a class of a 100 students. Neck hair has been rising in the presence of spirits, oh, at least since Eliphaz described it 3000 years ago. And as we and the nurses all knew, Emily is still there, trapped inside an unresponsive body. Fortunately, this is an area that science is making some progress on, for just the week before we visited Emily, I read a story on TimesOnline with the provocative subtitle, "Forty per cent of patients in a ‘vegetative state’ are misdiagnosed."  It seems that with an MRI machine hooked up, doctors can communicate with 40% of the comatose patients who are actually completely conscious. That was our Emily.

Will Emily ever get her medical degree? Will she ever walk again? Terri Schiavo didn't, though her injury came at a later age than Emily's. But that night when we gathered in an anxious huddle of prayer, we eventually felt a certain peace, a comfort that not only would she survive, but she would be all right. The miracle that began that evening with her heart, will finish with ours. It is only the beats between that we and Emily find so hard.