Hope

When Rog and I moved into our house a couple of years ago, we were looking for something to put on top of our armoire/tv stand in our bedroom. We found a neat wooden base that held wooden letters to spell a word. I really wanted J-O-Y, but H-O-P-E fit better (and I don't think the store had a "J"). It is amazing to me that I see the word "HOPE" every morning and every night considering how important hope has been to us since Luke's diagnosis in utero.

"Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess,
for he who promised is faithful."
—Hebrews 10:23

Our deepest hope is that God will use Luke and his heart defect to deepen or bring about faith in those who know him and his story. Luke's story, however long, has been written because God has gifted people to diagnose and treat his heart disease. I came across an article the other day that embodied hope for our family. Ultimately, Luke is God's child and only He knows the number of his days, but we are feeling very thankful that people like Robin Shandas and Francois Lacour-Gayet have not wasted their God-given gift of science and medicine, and continue to give us hope for a long life for Luke.


You can read the entire article here, but basically a surgeon (Lacour-Gayet) and a mechanical engineer (Shandas) have partnered together to prototype an artificial pump that would substitute for the right ventricle (the one Luke is missing). This pump would be implanted in single ventricle kids when their heart is full-grown, at about age 15, in the hopes of avoiding a transplant down the road. No one really knows what happens to hearts like Luke's when they reach their 40's and beyond, since the "fix" for a single ventricle heart is only 30 years old. This device is one way to prolong the function of the heart. Amazing, right? Yes, we have hope in the medical world, but our only true hope, one that will never fail us, is God Himself!