Liz,

Several years ago a man was on his way to the airport. When he got onto the interstate his tire blew out. He had to get out and change it while the interstate traffic roared past just inches away.

Was he lucky?

When he got to the airport, he found that havving to change the tire made him late, and he missed his flight. He turned around and went back home.

Was he lucky?

When he arrived at home he turned on the TV and found out that the very flight he'd missed, the May 11, 1996 ValueJet flight 592, had crashed into the Everglades, killing everyone aboard.

Yes, CAH is lucky. Everything is lucky. CAH kids grow up learning more self discipline, more self-control, better health consciousness, to value themselves beyond just their physical condition, to have compassion for others. Their parents see them even more as gifts from God, and value and treasure the time they have with them. As those kids and parents research about CAH they learn of hundreds of worse conditions that many others have. That new perspective is of infinite value.

Romans 8:28 says, "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose."

Quite a while back there was a little girl whose life dream was to become a teacher, to open and expand the minds of children. But she got sick and became blind. A tragedy, right? Or was it.

Her younger sister who had always been jealous of her, suddenly felt incredible guilt about all those hostile feelings. She tried her best to make up for it by being her sister's eyes. They would take long walks for hours on end, the younger guiding the older, the younger describing what she saw in a intricate a detail as she could. If she missed the color of the sunset, then her sister couldn't "see" it, so she worked at putting that sight into words. This continued for years and years until eventually the family had enough money to send the older sister to a school for the blind.

The younger sister? Well, those years of tranlsating the beauty around her into words allowed her, much later on, to write a series of books for children, that became best sellers and are still in high demand today. While the older sister, Mary Ingalls, was blind, that blindness led to a venture that allowed countless millions of children to see and learn about pioneer America from the Little House on the Prairie Books. Had Mary never been blind Laura Ingalls Wilder would have never developed the talent to write those books.

Mary is now immortalized and has contributed to teaching many more children than she ever could have had she never been blind.

My children are lucky to have CAH, because anything and everything is lucky, if you let it.