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It was a normal game of kickball, by a normal group of kids, on a normal 4th of July. Even when the ball struck 9-year-old Jacob Holdaway in the head during the course of play, most labeled it a fairly normal occurrence for that particular game.
But what happened next was anything but normal.
The boy from Fairland, IN was playing the popular game with friends and family when he was hit in the head with the kickball. His parents didn’t make too much of the ordeal, after all, there wasn’t any blood or bruises. They just assumed the little guy simply had his bell rung.
But within a few days, Jacob began to vomit and experience severe headaches. Thinking the symptoms were related to the kickball incident, his parents took him to a nearby hospital where doctors performed a CT scan. The results were life-changing.
The kickball hadn’t done any damage at all, said the doctors, but the test results showed a “golf ball-sized mass” inside the young boy’s brain.
Jacob underwent immediate surgery and the physicians were able to remove almost all of the mass; a small piece of the tumor was wrapped around a nerve and couldn’t be extracted. The surgeons believed the mass to be benign, but encouraged chemotherapy to prevent the fragment from causing any further problems.
Given all the medical scares and related costs and lost sleep, most people might assume the family would be bitter. But unlike so many other things about that fateful day, this family isn’t normal. They are devout and faithful Christians. Andy Hamilton, Jacob’s father, knows the truth. “Our faith in God, we think He had control of it all the way. And, you know, if he hadn’t got hit in the head with that, we wouldn’t have found out.”
That’s a great perspective to have in the face of trials.
Click here for the online report.
Topics Illustrated Include:
Accident
Blessing
Cancer
Gratitude
Health
Injury
Kids
Pain
Sports
Suffering
Thankfulness
Trial
Trusting God
(Resource cataloged by David R Smith)
