It started like any other day. December 15, 2005. I got up, sent the kids off to school and wiped off the counters to prepare to make some breads for freezing and broccoli salad. I nibbled on some of the walnuts and raisons meant for the salad.

I love walnuts and raisons. Mix it up with oatmeal, apples and maple syrup and I feel like I'm in heaven. Well, not HEAVEN exactly, but...........you know. When I am full out fasting, especially for a long time, it's one of the few things I truly miss eating.

The stereo was cranked up playing Christmas carols as I stuck cloves into oranges for a centerpiece. That's when the call came.

It was my son-in-law calling from his office at the hospital where he works in the website dept. His normal Texas drawl was subdued. "Connie, Amber's in the hospital. She had an accident last night on her way home." "Ohhhhhhh, how bad is it?" I asked. "She's in a coma....they don't know whether she will make it. If you want to see her you should come as soon as you can".

My heart...........I couldn't breathe. Amber...................oh God.....Amber...............

My mouth went into overdrive. I couldn't stop praying. I prayed in English..........and in a language the sound of which was familiar to me, but to this day, I knew not what was being spoken. I moved with the speed of a much younger woman. I showered, dressed, dried and curled my hair, put my makeup on. I know for a fact that I did all of that because I always do all of that..........but I was so numb I couldn't think. I don't like driving in the city. I put my fear aside and called my husband to tell him where I was going. I wanted him to drive me but he couldn't leave right then. I left taking my adult son with me.

When I got to the hospital I found the room filled to overflowing with family and friends. Where were John and Joanne? Several minutes later they stumbled into the waiting room. John was holding Joanne up. They saw me and immediately covered me with their hugs. "Connie........Connie........" John whispered. "Thank you so much for coming." I didn't know what to say. Nothing seemed like it would make any difference right then. Maybe my presence would be enough to convey my love for Amber and her family.

I asked if I could see her. John, in a voice that sounded like it was coming from somewhere other than himself, said, "I won't have ANY funeral faces in there. I only want the prayer of FAITH spoken over Amber. You have faith, Connie, you can go in, but I'm not letting just everyone in". I felt honored that he trusted me.

I knew what they were feeling. The doctors had told them that Amber had NO chance. They told them to prepare themselves that she would not make it but even if she did that they should make arrangements for her to live in a residential nursing home for the rest of her life. They said that, assuming she came out of her coma, she would never be able to do anything, including opening her eyes voluntarily. Think Terry Shiavo and take it down five notches.

I went into her room. I felt the peace of the Lord, but I discerned in my spirit the presence of something other than God. Like an evil thing that wanted to take her from the world. I saw her leg in a brace and her face......her beautiful face............oh my God. "Amber", I whispered............"Amber". The tears were falling freely.

I saw the tube going into her arm........feeding her. It came to me, Amber wasn't eating. She was getting "food" in a tube, but she wasn't eating. Amber and I used to fast together when she lived with us a couple of summers before. We drank carrot juice on our fasts. My face is scrunching up just thinking about it. I've gotten used to it a little bit now, but I still don't like it.

I leaned into Amber's face and whispered, "You're fasting, Amber, and I'm going to fast with you. I promise that I won't stop until the day that you wake up..........either here, or in Heaven. I am not going to stop while you are still in this in-between place." I lightly touched her arm and heard the ventilator breathing for her.

I've fasted for forty days........many times. Going without food is not uncommon for me. I'm used to it now........well, as used to it as you can become, you know, being in a mortal body as we are. I expected that this fast would be at least 40 days....maybe longer. I prepared myself to go longer than I've ever gone. I got blue algae pills for protein, special teas, and prayed for the resolve that I knew I would need.

Two weeks and a day later Amber woke up. No, you didn't read that wrong, Amber woke up. The details aren't important right now. What is important for you to know is that her brain stem is STILL, even today, December 15, 2007, two years later, NOT healed.

Every few months Amber has MRI's done. Apparently, the brain stem continues to show so much damage that the doctor's can't figure out why she isn't STILL in a coma. Yet, she walks, she talks, she drives again, she has a job, she rides her horse. Amber is a walking, talking miracle. You can say what you will about God....or the lack thereof. But you will never convince POH that God does not exist, and you will never convince me that He is not benevolent to those who love Him and call on His name. My God, the God that I have come to know and love, sends grace and healing....not pain and death.

If you would like to see a five minute video of her story that was on the 700 Club last Christmas Eve you can find that at the CBN website. Go to media center and click on that. Then type Amber Nesbitt into the search engine there. It should come up with the video. I hope you will go there. Her story is a blessing. At the end you will even see her playing her flute.

That is why I started my blog and why I tacked "in the fast lane" at the end of my title. This is why I fast. I know what I am. I don't need anyone to tell me. I am a housewife and I am common. The God I believe in is not common however. He is strong and mighty and ready and willing to save. He filled Amber with faith, He filled her parents with faith and He filled POH with faith. The Bible says that without faith it is impossible to please God. How about this Christmas, while you are singing carols with your family or friends you think about Jesus......not as the little baby in the manger, but as the Lord of Heaven and Earth with healing in His wings. He's there, closer than your very breath.................



Amber as she looked before the accident



Amber with her parents several months after the accident

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Celtic Mist had this on her blog a few days ago and I liked it so much I decided to take her idea. I hope you don't mind CM. I just needed some hugs and kisses at the moment and I couldn't resist.

For everyone who knows what I've gone through in the past week and a half you must know how much I appreciated your comments, love and support. I'll take a kiss too if you want to. Just drag the curser to my picture and click! *smack* back to you too!

Love you all,
POH

This is a repost of two posts I wrote a year ago.  I am posting them because of a conversation we are having over on the Questionstream. If you have not been over there you are missing out.  It's a different way of getting to know people. It doesn't take the place of the blogstream....it adds to it.  Anyway, if you already read this then forgive me. If you didn't I am posting it again for AW and Fme.  Love, POH

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There is nothing I wish I could give you in this life that is more valuable than my faith. I have many things. I've lived long enough upon this earth that I have amassed a few trinkets. Barring an unforeseen disaster, the rest of my life looks to be as comfortable, financially speaking, as the beginning of it was. Yet nothing I own, nothing I could hand down when I die, none of my grandmother's silver that sits in her mahogany corner cabinet in my living room, no amount of money, status, name recognition, or any other family heritage, can compete with the worth of the faith that hides in me. If I could give it to you like someone gives someone else a live kidney, or part of their liver, I would do it. I would do it for any one of you. I would die and let you have my beating heart, if I thought that would give you my faith. If I could, I would put my faith so far down inside you that no one, even the ones you love, could touch it. Not with their sarcasm, their rolling eyes, or their intellectual unbelief in a God Who is so much more intelligent and so much wiser than any feeble mortal mind, yet chooses to make His message so simple that a child can understand it. I would put it in such a secret place that even when the winds came and blew at your life, you would rock steady, baby. I would fix it so that even when the rain beat on the door of your life, you could close your eyes and know that you are not alone in the storm and that when your night of weeping is over, great joy will come in the morning. I would hide it away so far inside of you somewhere that even you, in your moments of sin and unbelief, could not rip it out. It would sit there..... waiting......waiting......waiting..... for you to leave your own way and the stuff that holds you and come back to the One Who gave His life for you. It would wait for you to get sick of your own meager, base and lowly thoughts and chase after the only One Who has the Words of eternal life. It would wait for you to get sick of your lust and desires for the things of the world, and your hope that someday ..... someday.....a person....a man or a woman...will fill that empty place inside of you that only He can fill. It would wait for you to get sick of yourself. If I could do that, I would. I promise, I would. The faith I have didn't come by happenstance. It didn't come by luck, or chance or because I'm better than anyone else. It came because I decided that I wanted God more than I wanted my life. It came because I have made many choices, in the face of severe adversity, to hang onto the Rock of my salvation. It came because I chose, even as I hugged my pillow and begged God to let me die, to tie a knot in the end of my rope called faith......my teensy little, wavering, flip-flopping rope of faith, and hang on. I hung on, baby, and I didn't let go. Even when my hands burned as the rope rubbed against them. Even when my face was blotchy and my eyes swollen from crying. I hung on. Even when the fear overwhelmed me and I thought I would be swallowed up by it........I hung on. I have a faith and a hope that no one can take from me. No one. Not even my dearest and best. If you wanted it, though, I would give it to you. Free. Because I got it for free. I've paid for it with my very life, but it was still free of charge from the One Who gave it to me. If I could, I would make you a prisonerofhope.

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Hope. The word itself breeds hope. It is almost unnecessary to define it because hope is such a 'hope'ful word in and of itself. Hope springs eternal in the human heart. Hope against hope. All that remain are faith, hope and love. "I hope..........".

What is hope? Is it a substance? The Bible calls faith the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen. So, then faith and hope are connected, right? It is not my intention to talk about faith, as in spiritual faith, but can hope be separated from that? Maybe. But not for the prisonerofhope. So, by proxy, hope is a substance and it is evidence.

It seems to me that hope is something that you either have or you don't have. It is fairly obvious when you look at someone to tell whether they have hope or not. Children, by and large, have hope. It is in their nature. You can see by their shining eyes and 'hopeful' looks. There are a few children who have no hope and it is a pitiful child indeed who has not. Their faces are drawn and have a pallor of death about them that is not natural to childhood. I think of Whispers post about a couple of her day care children and think that their hollow expressions might be indicative of no hope. With children though, hope generally can be revived fairly easily if they are taken from their situation and placed in such a place that hope can thrive. For an adult, hope is a harder commodity to come by. Their experiences, the width and breadth of them, caters to an on-going sense of doom, even when hope is apparent. Adults tend to speak 'death' over themselves with self-deprecating statements like, "with my luck......", or "that would never happen to me.......",



When I came on a year ago, a fellow blogger told me repeatedly, that he did not like the fact that I used the word "prisoner"ofhope for my blog nickname. He corrected me, saying that my faith was a choice that I made and implied that I was not being held captive in anyway to my choices except by my continued choice to do so. In other words, I was not being held to hope against my will.

In a sense that is not true though. When one has hope, and it stays them through good and bad, less and more, thick and thin......and all the other things that life dishes out on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis........the staying power of the hope begins to keep them. It fills them up, gives them joy...........even in the darkest night. It is the light in their eyes and the glow on their cheeks. It is the invisible substance that causes them to have courage and perseverance even through the worst of times as well as the best of times.

Holocaust survivors know something about hope. Some gave up all hope at the beginning and resigned themselves to their apparent fate. Some fought until they were captured and then gave up hope. Some, never gave up hope and fought in small bands of resistance. Some were successful in their escapes and some were not but none gave up hope until they either died by the bullet as they fled or made good their daring escape. Some, like the Christian believer, Corrie Ten Boom, retained hope even after she was taken to a concentration camp for hiding Jews in a secret hiding place her family constructed in her attic, and had to stay there for several years, even losing her father and sister to the Nazi's. She continued to hope against hope and eventually was released, knowing even if she wasn't that her greater hope, the one she held in the Lord Jesus Christ, would ultimately save her anyway. Before her death several years ago as an old woman, she traveled around telling her story to groups all over the world. Her face shone with hope. Hope for victory over evil, even in this world as well as the next, and the hope of a greater life on the other side with her Savior.

The name I chose, prisonerofhope, was not original with me. There is a book, written by a Holocaust survivor, by that name. I chose it because the circumstances of my life, some I have shared and some I have not, have caused me to develop the kind of perseverance which the Bible says breeds hope. At this late stage of my life, I have not accomplished all that I ever set out to do but in the process of what I have done I have gained patience, perseverance, faith, love and hope.

No one who knows me casually would think that I am prone to despair. Whisper says I have a 'sunny disposition' and for the most part I do. I have spent the past 30 years training myself in my desperate and despairing times to hope against hope and I will no longer, in my occasional despair, allow myself to lack hope. Hope sustains me. It feeds me day by day more than the food that people think is so all-fired important to eat every three or four hours. Hope keeps me alive. The God of hope stills my trembling body and soul when I think I have nowhere to go and no one to save me........even from my self and my human frailties and weaknesses. Heide reminded me tonight to "Be still and know that He is God". Thanks Heide. I needed to hear that more than you know. That is what is called a word in season..