There are no atheists in foxholes - or hospital waiting rooms

It's the kind of thing that is absolutely impossible to ever be prepared for.  You think that it only happens to other people, because it's too unthinkable, too nausea-inducing, to contemplate that it could ever happen to you.

But it does.

My brother's eldest daughter was hit by a car today.  When I first heard the news, all we knew was that she had been riding on her ripstik out in front of her house, had been hit by a car, and it was very serious -- so serious that her local hospital (she lives out in the country in New Hampshire) decided to med-evac her to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.  As more information has trickled in, we've learned that she has a fractured skull, but her vital signs are stable and trending in the right direction and the swelling in her brain is decreasing.  She will be kept sedated for the next 3-5 days while her brain and her condition generally is monitored.  So all we do is wait, and hope.

I'm not a praying person.  Whatever belief I may have in God -- and I am deeply unsure of it, honestly -- I definitely do not believe that God is an intervenor in the world's events.  If he/she/it were, then things like the Holocaust would never have happened.

But as I was driving home from work today, shaking and crying and terrified, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I said, out loud, "please, God, let her be OK.  Please.  Please."  And every time I think about that gorgeous, sweet, smart, cool, funny girl lying in a hospital bed, with tubes coming out of her, I ask again.

Please.  She has to be OK.