From day one, my relationship with Glenn has been an adventure.
When we started dating, I had just started the process of trying to move overseas. We got engaged in a foreign country. We got married during a pandemic. Within the first few months of marriage, we have been to the ER in the middle of the night (kidney stones), had to have (expensive) repairs done on both of our cars, realized that my eyes are basically allergic to contacts now (so I finally decided to actually go through with the Lasik surgery I'd been considering for years), and experienced the normal ups and downs and lessons in communication that come with the territory of marriage.
And I've never been so happy in my entire life.
And I thought I couldn't love my husband any more than when he took such good, sweet, tender care me after my eye surgery, amidst all the pain and anxiety I felt that first night. He made me feel so safe.
But then I felt an even more profound and deep love for him as I watched someone else's blood trickle down his hand and crust over the wedding ring I had put on his finger a few months before, all because he got involved when he didn't have to.
I'm still amazed at the things that happened over Labor Day weekend. We went up to visit my brother and sister-in-law in the mountains of Virginia, a trip we almost decided to postpone because we've barely had a weekend at home over the past couple of months and were starting to feel weary from all the weekend trips. But we figured the rest of the fall wasn't going to be any less busy, so a holiday weekend would be the best time to go. We also almost weren't on that particular hiking trail at that exact time; our original plan was to do that hike first but we ended up hiking another trail in the morning and doing the waterfall hike in the afternoon.
It was just an ordinary, fun weekend with family-who-are-also-friends, really. Until it wasn't.
The short trail we were hiking ended in a beautiful, multi-tiered waterfall. We joined the masses in taking advantage of the photo op. As we were taking pictures at the bottom of the falls, Glenn said he thought he heard a scream. I didn't hear anything, so I told him I was sure it was nothing. But, sure enough, we saw other people looking towards the very top level of the waterfall and some people climbing up in that direction. Glenn told me to watch his backpack and immediate started scaling the rocky terrain to see what was going on.
I, not exactly being the wait-with-the-bags type, followed after he didn't come back after a few minutes and I couldn't see him anymore. When I got to the top, I saw two twenty-or-so-year-olds with bloody faces, one with a knot the size of a softball on her forehead and one with a gash on her knee down to the bone and her hand dangling 90 degrees from her bone-completely-sticking-out-of-the-skin snapped wrist. Apparently they had been standing on the rocks at the top of the waterfall taking pictures and had slipped and fallen face-first about two stories to the level below.
And then I saw my husband...holding the most badly bashed up girl's uninjured hand and praying with her.
She had been panicking before that...saying she wanted to die because the pain was so bad...and then asking anxiously if she was actually going to die. But she never screamed and cried again through the whole ordeal and kept asking Glenn to pray. Because she had hit her head, she couldn't always tell us her name or what day of the week it was, but she could tell us who was there with her, protecting her and taking care of her ("Jesus") and what he had done for her ("He died for me").
I've never been so proud of my husband as I watching him calm this frightened girl down (who, to add to everything else, was a study abroad student from Mexico and was worried what her family would think), by just keeping her talking and laughing as the EMT crew finally arrived (someone had to run all the way to the trail head just to get service to call 911) and pumped pain meds into her system and checked for other injuries.
And I'll never be able to fully express how full my heart felt when he walked towards me, looking all windblown and battle-weary, after being part of the team that carried her stretcher into the middle of the waterfall and tied it to the helicopter so she could be airlifted out.
I tell this story not to make much of my husband (even though he is pretty wonderful). I share it to magnify my Father. I cannot tell you how palpable his presence was in those intense hours...or how providential was his provision, from the fact that it didn't happen on a day when no one was around to help to the amazing fact that one of the first people on the scene was an off-duty EMT who was right there when it happened and knew they had to get the girls out of the cold water so they wouldn't go into shock and orchestrated carrying them across the river and down rocky edge of the falls to more level ground (when, surely, no one but a trained professional would have dared to more them with head injuries like that).
And this story has such a happy ending...We called the hospital that we heard they were taking them to, just to see if they would be willing to let us know if they had made it there and if they were alive. Much to our surprise, they actually let us talk to the young woman that Glenn had been most directly involved in helping!
She told Glenn that he (and the others involved) had saved her life. She also said, "I told my family that I saw God yesterday. And it was you."
If that doesn't knock the wind out of you, I don't know what will. My prayer is that God uses her testimony of how He quite literally saved her life to draw many people to Himself.
Several things were heavy on my heart as we processed through all this.
First, I am blown away that I get to be married to such a compassionate person who loves others so much that he is willing to put himself in, at the very least, inconvenient and at most, hazardous situations to help them.
Secondly, I was so convicted...If I didn't have such a husband, would I have ever even gotten involved at all? Would I have turned away, saying, "Those poor girls...I hope they're okay..." Would I have been like the "religious" people in the Good Samaritan story (Luke 10:25-37) who walked right by the man who had been robbed and beaten and left for dead...not wanting to be bothered or inconvenienced or slowed down. "Not my problem." Only the Samaritan got involved, saving him from, most likely, bleeding out or starving to death on the side of the road.
In this passage, Jesus uses the parable to teach us that we are to love our neighbors as ourselves. But do we? Do we really? I feel deeply humbled to have had to privilege or watching my husband actually do that.
Lastly, I've thought several times since this happened: If God can save two girls who were alone and far from home from a situation that could have easily been life threatening...why on EARTH do I worry so much about my own life? All my fear and anxiety and worrying is essentially me telling God, "You won't really take care of me or protect me or provide for me." But how could I doubt his goodness and protection and provision when I got to witness him work a miracle in saving these girls lives (and using Glenn and a few other kind passersby as part of that)?
I hope this story is an encouraging to someone else as it was to me. May we not miss such evidences of his presence and provision and the things who uses our circumstances to teach us.
