Bringing Elizabeth Home Read Online Free

path from the house to the corral. Her mother encouraged her to hurry but to stay on the path so as to not get lost. Along the way, Grandmother stopped abruptly when she saw a rattlesnake coiled up alongside the path. Before she could back away it attacked, biting her on the knee. When her mother saw her sit down on the ground, she realized something was wrong and raced out to help her. Back then a rattlesnake bite was invariably fatal. Her mother carried her to the yard and placed her in a hammock that hung between two large trees next to their home. Her leg turned black from the poison. When nearby Hopi Indians heard that a child had been bitten, they came to see her and offer remedies and gifts. The Indians were kind to the family, but they were also certain my grandmother was facing death. Her parents placed poultices on the wound and prayed over her knee, staying by her side through the day and night. The next morning, to everyone's surprise, the venom was oozing out of her knee. Grandmother was weak from the bite for months after, and couldn't walk for a while, but she lived and eventually was completely healed. She had a strong will to live, and this has been passed along to the women in my family for generations. Elizabeth is certainly no exception to this trait.
    The Francom family has always been one of strong faith. From the time I was a child, and all throughout my life, I believe I have witnessed many miracles. Through scripture, the Lord makes it very clear that faith is not developed by miracles, but that miracles are a result of great faith. Miracles are around us every day, but we need to learn how to see them. In life, there are no coincidences. Things that seemingly happen “out of the blue” are never really just random. When I was a child, our family would take vacations that usually involved all eleven of us piling into the family station wagon. One time while driving to Lake Tahoe, we were running very low on gas and my father looked desperately for a gas station, but there was none to be found. My mother studied Dad's trusty map and thought she'd found a shortcut to the next town. Soon after taking this new route we realized it was not a shortcut at all, and we indeed ran out of gas at the top of a large hill. I remember my father saying a prayer and then letting the car coast down the hill. At the bottom of the hill, he steered the car around a bend in the road, and there we found a man sitting in his truck with a barrel tank of gas in the back, complete with a nozzle and hose. The man readily filled our tank, and when my father tried to pay he refused to accept even a dime. I have no idea what the driver was doing out there in the middle of nowhere, but there he was, just sitting at the bottom of that hill waiting for us. We marveled at the notion that God heard our prayer—and answered it with a tank of gas in the middle of nowhere.
    When my younger brother was eighteen months old, he contracted meningitis and encephalitis. I was three years old at the time, but I can remember the profound effect it had on our family. We prayed for him constantly. Fearing the worst, the doctors had told my mother to go home and tend to her other children. They didn't think my brother was going to pull through, and if he did, he'd certainly live the rest of his life with physical challenges. Yet my mother wouldn't leave his side. She had eight other children to tend to, but she couldn't leave my brother alone to die. The faith she had was incredibly strong. She knew he'd be healed through the blessings he received—and in the end, he was. He is alive today and is a brilliant, successful married man and father who survived his illness with no side effects whatsoever. The family faith overpowered the medical prognosis. That, to me, was another miracle.
    Because faith is so strong in my family, it was vitally important to me that I marry someone whose faith matched my own. I had serious doubts as to whether I would