The Tranes are an active family with three busy children. As they finished dinner one evening, the children went upstairs to play.

“We thought they were playing hide-and-go-seek,” the children’s mother, Francis, recalls, “but they were really talking out by the window to friends. Max was trying to get a friend’s attention down below in the alleyway.”

Their father, Byron, says, “I heard something that sounded like a screen fall out of the window. I ran upstairs and saw my little Natalie looking out the window. So I pulled her aside and looked out down the window and I saw Max on the ground. He was bleeding.”

Francis says, “I heard him screaming, 'Call 911.' I remember being very loud and hysterical ‘cause it’s all happening really quickly, screaming, ‘My son fell out a window, and he has a head injury.’”

Max was rushed to the hospital. Max’s pediatrician, Dr. Bill Sears, met them there. “He had a massive brain injury,” Dr. Sears explains. “He hit his head so hard that he had a lot of bleeding between the skull bone and the brain. Since the brain is like in a rigid box, when it bleeds, the blood can’t go anywhere. It compresses the brain.”

Doctors operated, but gave the Tranes very little hope for Max’s recovery.

Francis says, “He had finished the surgery, and he says, ‘We’re just going to have to watch him hour by hour and see if he makes it.’ I said, ‘Are you trying to tell me my son may not make it?’ He said, ‘Quite possibly.’” 

Dr. Sears says, “My nurse, in fact, reminded me of what I said the day after Max’s injury. She said, ‘You came back to the office the next morning and you said, if Max survives, it will be a miracle.’”

Family and church members prayed for Max around the clock. After several days, doctors knew Max would live, but he was in a deep coma.

“The doctors pretty much said that there’s a real good chance that he would be a vegetable,” Byron says, “that he would not be able to talk again and that he would be fully paralyzed on his right side. Francis and I would pray together in the hospital room, and prayer was the only place we really had to go in those really dark, really dark times. God is the only One that could handle what was going on.”

After only three weeks in the hospital, Max was moved to a rehab unit for another five weeks. Max had to learn to walk, talk and function again. Today, at age 12, Max’s parents and doctors are amazed at how he’s progressed.

“I think it was a miracle that he made it. I really do,” Dr. Sears says.

Max says, “It’s been really fun just to exercise, and it’s been helping me get better.”

Because of the difficulties they’ve faced together, the Tranes have a new perspective on God’s faithfulness.

“A great part of such a horrible tragedy is learning God’s faithfulness and learning how to stand up in the face of challenges,” says Francis.

“He got me out of a wheelchair and out of a walker,” Max says.

Byron adds, “He’s out riding his bike. He’s going to school. He’s a miracle so far -- a miracle in motion.”