On Saturday, Tristyn and Trent went home to their family!

When they first entered the burn unit, the doctors were not terrifically optimistic about their recovery. Both boys were so very sick- the doctors were saying that they should expect them to be in the hospital through Thanksgiving and Christmas at least – most likely about six months.

Now, one month, one week, and one day after the fire, they have been deemed healthy enough to discharge.

I was able to spend Friday afternoon with the boys, and they just looked so great. It was hard to believe that these were the same boys who had been fighting for their lives just a couple weeks before. Their parents had been told to go home and get things ready for them, and I just missed them, so it was just the little boys and me there. It was a really great time.

We were coloring when some of the nurses approached and asked the boys if they wanted to go see a movie in the theater downstairs. Tristyn said he wanted to, but Trent wanted to say up and color. The nurses took Tristyn, and I stayed with Trent. At first, he was happy to color, but after a while, he began to look around for his brother, and say “Tristyn? Tristyn?” I asked him if he wanted to go find his brother, and he said yes, so I told him we could. He put both his arms up in the air and whispered, “Hold me.” I said, “You want me to hold you, Trent?” and he said, “Uh-huh.” He threw both arms around my neck and rested his chin on my shoulder, and just snuggled like a little two year old is supposed to do. It was sooooo neat. I asked the nurses if there were any areas of his body I should be cautious of injuring, and they told me that his back was a little tender, but mostly he was healed.

The movie, as it turned out, was played in Spanish (most of the kids in that burn unit were Hispanic.) The boys watched a lot more than I expected – about 30 minutes – and gobbled up tons of popcorn. But it got dull for them, so we left.

A little later, they had a going home party. I fed chocolate cake to Trent and he really gobbled it up. It was a very poignant party – a group of burned children were the guests. One boy named Dan – probably 12 or 13 – had been climbing a tree and grabbed a branch that turned out to be a power line. His arm and both legs were badly burned, and then he fell out of the tree and broke a bunch of bones. He kept saying, “Are they really going home?” and as he said it, the word “home” had a mystical/magical quality that made me think about how I feel about heaven. The longing for home just about breaks your heart.

The boys opened up four presents that the medical teams had bought for them, and played with the spiragraph a good bit. A while later when I began to leave, Trent didn’t want me to, and he talked me into staying a few minutes longer, watching them play computer games. It wasn’t hard to talk me into that.

It’s just so wonderful how God has heard your prayers. Its so obvious that so many people have prayed for them, and it literally brings tears of gratitude to my eyes as I write this to think of that. That God should do such good and obvious work for these boys is so wonderful. That so many should ask him to do it is also wonderful.

This our God has done – more than we could ask or imagine. He is so very good.

-Ethan Brown