But Then God

The night of June 5th started like any other in their quiet Spring Hill, Tennessee neighborhood. Leslie and JP put their kids to bed. JP was still recovering from surgery the week before, trying to get comfortable. By midnight, Leslie was out cold.

Then came the popping.

"Leslie, I think that's gunfire," JP said. She shot up in bed. "It's fireworks. It has to be fireworks." They ran down the hallway, and more shots rang out. There was no pretending anymore.

That's when two-year-old London started screaming. For one split second, Leslie thought, great, it woke her up.

Leslie opened the front door in time to see a car speeding out of the neighborhood. JP opened London's door and found her standing in her crib, covered in blood. "Dial 911," he yelled. "She's bleeding from her head."

JP carried her outside while Leslie grabbed towels and stayed on the phone. "It was the longest six minutes of our entire life," she says. "It literally felt like eternity." The dispatcher kept asking where the entry wound was. All Leslie could see was blood.

Leslie rode in the ambulance with London to Vanderbilt. JP stayed behind with a crime scene and their other little ones, who somehow slept through most of it. Police wouldn't even let him give London her stuffed koala or her blanket. Everything was evidence.

At the hospital, they rushed London into a trauma room and closed the doors. Leslie could hear her screaming. "My soul is in so much pain at this point," she remembers. When they finally let her in, the doctors were pulling wood out of London's hair.

The bullet had come through the wall of her bedroom and barely clipped the solid wood railing of her crib. The wood splintered and slowed it down. It struck London's head, fractured her skull, and dropped. Later, a detective sent them a picture of the bullet lying right where she had been sleeping, curled up in the corner the way she always does.

There was bleeding on her brain, and a piece of bone had pressed down right next to a main artery. The doctors waited twelve hours to see if she would need surgery. She didn't. Thirty-six hours after the shooting, London was home.

"We surgically couldn't have done what happened here," the doctor told them. If the bone had gone any further, it would have nicked that artery and she would have bled out before the ambulance arrived. If it hadn't gone as far, they would have had to operate. Leslie calls it what it is: a miracle.

Here is the part Leslie can't stop telling. Just days before the shooting, she felt an urgency she couldn't explain to swap out London's crib for a solid wood one. She told her mother-in-law she was doing it whether or not anyone helped. "I had no idea why I was swapping that bed out," she says. "If you look at that crib rail, you then know why."

Rearranging for that crib meant moving their three-year-old upstairs and turning his old room into an office. That night, another bullet went straight into that room.

Two children who could have been lost that night. But then God.

Surviving was not the end of it. The bullet hit the part of London's brain that handles sensory processing and spatial awareness, so now there are therapies, lots of them. The doctors say brain damage like hers doesn't regenerate. Leslie has heard "never" before. "Doctors know numbers," she says. "They don't know God."

The whole family carries that night. Nobody is sleeping much. All four of the little ones are in trauma therapy. Every night, Leslie and JP spend an hour going over the security cameras they put up, because their six-year-old keeps asking, am I safe? JP had to step away from his job to be home, unpaid. "God didn't bring us this far to forsake us now," Leslie says. "He's never failed me."

Then she says something that stops you cold. The shooting was between two teenagers on their street. Leslie wanted to be angry. She thought it would make her feel better. Instead, as a mom, her heart broke for them. "God doesn't love London any more than he loves those boys," she says. London got her but then God story. Leslie believes those boys can have one too.

About six weeks after the shooting, we came to their home with Jeremy Cowart to make art.

Jeremy asked Leslie to write the words she kept coming back to right around one of the bullet holes in the wall. In her own handwriting: but then God. London wandered through the whole shoot with a piece of tape in her mouth, the most two-year-old thing imaginable. "She's got the ultimate story the rest of her life," someone joked. "She can play two lies and a truth and win every time."

In London's room, they turned out the lights and shined a flashlight through the holes in her little helmet. Dots of light spilled across the walls like stars, in the same room where everything happened.

The kids drew whatever they wanted. JP wrote a letter to anyone walking through something hard. It wasn't about anger or fear. It was about hope, and pushing forward, because things are going to get better.

Jeremy handed Leslie the crayons. "I feel like a scribble," she said. "I feel like everything's tied up in a ball." She drew loop after loop, color after color. Her kids. The laundry. The groceries. The therapies. "Way out in the field is all the normal responsibilities of adulthood," she said. "But they're somewhere lost on the outer edge, because everything else is in the middle." Then she pressed a dark crayon into the very center. "In the middle should be me."

Jeremy asked the question every worn-out mom knows by heart. "How do you take care of you when all of this needs you too?"

Then came the moment nobody could have planned.

At the kitchen table, Leslie held London in her lap. JP held the camera. On Jeremy's laptop, fortunes flashed past, one after another. Without looking, Leslie stopped them.

It landed on: Your scars will become constellations guiding others home.

They projected those words onto London's face, and her dad took the picture. The projector cast plain white letters. In the photo, the words came out glowing in yellow and orange and pink. Nobody can explain it.

Stars from her helmet. Constellations on her face. A family that keeps choosing hope.

Today London's art lives on shirts and hoodies: but then God around the bullet hole, Leslie's circles, JP's letter with the crib rail, and the fortune glowing on London's face. Proceeds go back to the family for London's ongoing medical bills.

London is still here. Toe-walking, stomping, healing, and already guiding others home.