August 31 has always carried weight for me.

On August 31, 2005, I traveled to Grand Bay, Alabama with my father and brother to help clean up my grandmother’s property in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Cleanup meant hauling limbs, cutting fallen trees, and clearing debris from the yard.

About two hours in, I wandered over to help my dad as he was cutting down a tree. What had once been a 30-foot pine had been snapped by the storm and now stood only 10–12 feet tall. I was helping direct the fall. As I stepped out of the way, I slipped and fell. Somehow, the tree twisted and fell sideways—directly across my back.

I was crushed between the weight of the pine and the earth.
I couldn’t breathe.
I could barely move my arms.

I reached forward, grasping—desperate to be pulled free, desperate for life.

My father rushed over, but the tree was too heavy to move. He grabbed my arms and tried to pull me out. My dad is 5’10”, 200 pounds of solid muscle—yet when our grip slipped, he fell backward, unable to budge me even an inch.

In that moment, I was certain my life on earth was over.

I was calm.
I was ready.
I waited for the final moments of suffocation to pass.

Then my dad—panicked, desperate—felt prompted to try one more time. He grabbed my arms again and pulled. And somehow, miraculously, I slipped free.

Immediately, I knew my body was broken. I was contorted on the ground with no feeling below my arms. And just as immediately, I knew my life had been spared.

I lay there for another 45 minutes with a broken and dislocated spine, broken ribs, and a punctured lung slowly filling with blood, waiting for a helicopter to arrive. Still, I knew I would live.

Later, doctors would tell us they didn’t know a lung could hold that much blood without bursting. The surgeon said he had never seen a spine broken so severely in someone who survived.

On August 31, 2005—two weeks after my 16th birthday—my story of living with a T5 complete spinal cord injury began.

Eleven years later, I learned something that stopped me in my tracks.

Our firstborn child was due on August 31, 2016.

From the very first day I was injured, people questioned whether I would ever be able to have children. That question lingered quietly for years. And now, here was the answer—arriving on the very same date that once marked the worst day of my life.

It felt like a whispered response to a question first asked 11 years earlier.
A reminder that God is never finished writing the story.

Many people assume August 31 is the darkest day of my life. But my memory of that day also holds a miracle. It holds a voice saying, “You will live and prosper with a message of hope and faith.” It holds the beginning of a life marked by purpose.

My prayer is that August 31, 2016 would echo that truth—but without the crushing weight. That it would be a day marked not by mourning, but by celebration. That tears would fall—not from pain, but from joy. That what once carried suffering would now carry new life.

May August 31 be a day of worship for the Giver of life—the One who brings beauty from ashes, purpose from pain, and redemption where we least expect it.

Oh, how great is His redeeming love.