Beauty

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Ellie Boggs

Beauty.

It is magnificently beyond the definitions we imagine.

It is not visual conformity to changing cultural demands.

No, beauty exalts the spirit and the mind. It pours forth grace and excellence. It has brilliance. Extremity. It is bountiful goodness.

Pause and crack open the door of your life, for just a moment. Let a trickle of beauty~light interrupt your day. See... and feel the warmth of beauty in the story of Ellie.

Ellie has Cerebral Palsy.

Her parents got the news this month that she is a candidate to have SDR surgery January 5, 2010. This is for a Selective Dorsal Rhizotomy (SDR). Put simply, the surgeon will make an incision over her lower spine, lift off the bone, test the nerves to see which ones are causing muscle spasms, then cut them.

The muscle spasticity is a problem connected with Cerebral Palsy, and makes it difficult for Ellie to walk. By cutting the nerves causing the spasticity, this helps eliminate the scissor gait (legs crossing in front of each other when walking), and should make it easier for Ellie to walk.

It should also help with the discomfort of having tight muscles all the time. Imagine yourself trying to walk and always having a perpetual charlie horse in your legs!

The surgeon believes Ellie is an excellent candidate for this surgery, and the results would be “possibly life-changing”.

Obviously, we want Ellie to have the best chance possible to be able to walk, even though it hurts our heart to think of her having surgery, and knowing she will have pain from that, and during therapy afterwards. (If you’ve ever had knee or hip or any kind of surgery and/or physical therapy, think about being 4-years-old and trying to understand what’s happening and why it hurts!)

Of course, the costs of traveling to the far western side of Canada for Ellie to have her surgery and then to Florida for four months to have intensive physical therapy are huge.

If you’d like to Help Ellie Walk, check out our calendar!

What beautiful love of parents. What beautiful weakness that moves our distracted minds to consider our own bounty. What a precious smile of such a little one who proudly embraces her life as her own.

And what a beautiful opportunity to bless another, to touch the heart of hopeful parents, who have born so very much.

To give, just a bit, to see more beauty blossom in an already lovely life.

And to receive another gift in return, a gorgeous calendar with the photographic artwork of one who has an eye to capture beauty and a heart that has been captured by Grace.

Each month, your eyes will drink in the beauty. And your heart will remember.

That somewhere, that day, a little life was being touched again

and graced again

with the beauty of love.

Will you share in the beauty set before you? Click here.

I do not know Ellie Boggs and I only know the photographer cyberly as a fellow member of the gratitude community. But being the mother of a special needs child, I felt led to share Ellie's beauty with you. I know what it is like to seek God's provision for help for your disabled child that you cannot provide conventionally. Praise be to God that He is unconventional! He delights to allow US, strangers to this family, to participate in His generosity, His grace, His provision. Thereby, we are blessed and receive even more than we give. Such is the Father's way... giving beauty for ashes, multiplied many times over.

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