Warning: This chapter involves the description of the scars/marks left on a young girl after enduring physical abuse.
This chapter is sad BUT I promise it does get better as the story progresses.
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The doctor walked into the hospital room checking on his post-surgery patient. It had been her birthday when they brought her in with a bullet wound. The bullet had just barely missed her heart and lungs. But she did have freshly fractured ribs, bones that had to be rebroken to be properly set and a concussion.
"God must have something special planned for you... You're one strong cookie," the doctor murmured.
He couldn't help but remember what he had seen when she had first arrived.
********** EARLIER **********
"What do we have?" the doctor asked as he went over the paperwork the EMTs gave him.
"We're not entirely sure. We found her with three adults who were DOA and two guns... You are going to want to fully examine her, Joe. It appears that she has dealt with some serious abuse so we aren't positive as to whether we know the full extent of her injuries," an EMT replied.
"What!" The doctor finally really looked at the girl. He noticed a faint hand print on her cheek and a yellowing bruise on her neck. "I'll definitely have to do that... We're going to need to know the full extent of her injuries."
"Okay. Well, I guess I'll catch you later."
“Hey, Seth!” Joe called out before the EMT had walked out the door.
The EMT turned back and started to walk back as he asked, “Yeah?”
“Pray for her, please.”
“We will… We’ll pray for both of you.”
“Thanks,” Joe said, the sorrow shinning from his eyes.
“With God’s help you’ll fix the little girl. Don’t forget that through Him all things are possible.”
“I know… Could you tell Mary I may be late tonight?”
“Yeah… I’ll also ask that prayer warrior of a wife of yours to pray for her. I have a feeling that God has something big planned for our little fighter.”
Joe watched Seth leave then went to examine the girl. What he had seen sickened him; it was unlike anything he had seen since he started his career in the small town of Eden.
When her shirt was removed, both Doctor Joe and Nurse Rebekah gasped in horror. From her shoulders down to the waistband of her tattered jeans it looked like a battle field. There were more bruises than they could bear; they seemed to bleed into one another. The multiple bruises were in all stages of being; some were fresh, some were yellowing, and some were starting to disappear. Then on her back between her shoulder blades she had more scars than could be counted; all caused from her body being used as an ashtray. Then interspersed all over were scars, some years old and some just weeks old, which appeared to have been caused from having different knives carving into her skin. Intermixed with it all were welts that looked like they were caused from everything from belts to electrical cords to wooden/metal rods. But what sickened them the most was what was on her lower back… the words ‘liar’ and ‘useless’ were branded into her skin. It appeared that someone had branded her. Joe and Rebekah just could not fathom what kind of human being could sit back and watch such cruelty, let alone participate in harming a young, innocent girl.
Rebekah could barely hold back the tears as she helped remove the girl’s jeans. Her legs weren’t that different from her torso. If they hadn’t known better, Joe and Rebekah would have thought that she had grown up in a war zone. Even Joe was struggling with holding back the tears.
“Help me get her into a gown, I’m going to have to remove the bullet before we send her to get x-rays, a CT scan, and a cat scan,” Joe said.
“I pray that after this she gets to live a normal, happy childhood,” Rebekah whispered.
“I hope so… She has dealt with more than anyone should have to, let alone a little girl. It’s the things like this that happen in the world that make me question God…”
“How do you do it? How do you manage to hold onto your faith?”
“I see the love of God everywhere, from the cry of a new born to the smile of a patient in recovery to the families who put everything aside to be here for each other… but most importantly I see it in the hope in the eyes of all those I treat. Whenever I start to feel myself falter in my faith I take a step back, breathe in a deep breath and remind myself that in order to have the good you have to have the bad. Plus, it's not God who does this kind of stuff... it's humans that are evil and cruel. ”
“Then with God’s grace, let’s get this little girl fixed up so she can do His will and be who she is meant to be.
**********
After the surgery and having her bones rebroken and set, they put her in an induced coma to help with her concussion. The morning after the operation Joe called his pastor, Jimmy, and told him about her. Jimmy added the girl to the Church’s prayer list. They ended up agreeing to meet up for lunch.
“Hi, Joe. So tell me more about this little fighter of yours,” Jimmy greeted.
“Hey, Jimmy. To be honest we don’t know a whole lot… From what Seth said they found her at her home and her parents and one other adult were found dead,” Joe explained as he tried to keep his emotions in check.
“So what all is going on with the girl? You sounded worried and heartbroken over the phone.”
Joe ran his hands through his hair as he tried to find the words to describe his little fighter.
“Joe? Are you all right?” Jimmy asked becoming increasingly more worried about Joe and this little girl.
“Jimmy… It’s just…” Joe couldn’t even finish his statement. As soon as he pictured his little fighter the tears that he had kept at bay finally broke out. Through his tears he finally managed to say, “I don’t get how someone could do that to a little girl!”
“What happened to her? Who did what to her?”
“I can’t fully describe what she looks like so you get the horror of it all,” Joe replied as he struggled to hold back the sobs that were suffocating him.
“What has she gone through?” Jimmy asked with shock as he felt his apprehension grow. All the ‘what ifs…’ that floated through his head couldn’t have prepared him for the true horror of what the little girl had really gone through.
Joe started crying harder but after a little while he was able to rein them in enough to speak. “If you were to see her body you’d say she lived in a war zone and had been tortured. The bruises will clear up but she has so many scars… I don’t know how she’ll be able to deal with them.”
After hearing this Jimmy could do nothing but stare at Joe in silence.
‘This girl must be pretty messed up if he’s so distraught over her,’ Jimmy thought.
In all of the years he had known Joe, he had never seen Joe lose control and had only seen him cry at the funeral of his identical twin, Jon. So the fact that he was so emotional over this little girl that he had just met disarmed Jimmy. He knew that he would bring her up to the congregation and try to do everything possible to make her life better.
“Let’s pray,” Jimmy suggested.
“Dear God, we ask you to show us the way to help this girl. Please, give us the strength to see life through her eyes and stand strong beside her. God, please stay with her and lift her up out of the black abys that is her life. We pray You use us all to do Your will in this world. We praise your name above all as we pray in Jesus’ eternal name, Amen.”
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Her Weary Path to Eternal Life (ON HOLD <TEMPORARILY>)
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