Editor’s Note: On May 11, Hannah Luce was involved in a plane crash in southern Kansas. A recent graduate of Oral Roberts University, she was the sole survivor in the accident that killed four people: Stephen Luth, Luke Sheets and Austin Anderson, all three recent graduates, and Garret Coble, a former instructor in the ORU College of Business.
I’m grateful to all of you who have been praying for Hannah’s recovery all these months. It’s been nine months since that terrible day in May when Hannah lost four close friends, four families lost their sons and brothers, and this world lost four young men who were serving their Lord with passion.
Thank you to for continuing to pray for her and for those families. You’ve been so gracious to continue to express your thoughts and prayers to them.
I can tell you that finally, after months of a challenging recovery, we are beginning to see real progress in Hannah physically. She’s endured months of real struggle and excruciating pain, but she’s finally done with physical therapy. In fact, she’s exercising quite a bit and getting into really good shape. She’s still feeling some nerve pain because of the skin grafts that cover 30 percent of her body.
Additionally, Hannah has made giant strides in how she processes this traumatic incident. The painful memories of the event would trigger symptoms of PTSD, the same kind that a soldier coming back from the battlefield might experience after seeing his friends perish in front of him. Thankfully, and by God’s grace, she has been able to work through a lot of this.
It’s amazing the amount of progress she’s made in the past two months, and in fact, she’s looking now to move out of our home and pursue the dreams that are in her heart. She’s starting a foundation called Mirror Tree to help those that have been affected by traumatic events and are living in refugee camps around the world. As Hannah describes it, “The most-traumatic, hurtful, shocking, devastating day of my life, it turns out, is every day for so many people around the world. Those are the people we need to reach out to.”
Hannah is in the process of writing a book that details not just the accident, but more her friendship with the young men who lost their lives and the process of recovery. She also details the sense of hope she now has for her own life and for others like her who have been impacted by trauma and have no hope. Her desire is to inspire that hope through that book, which will come out this fall, and through the foundation.
Out of respect for Hannah, we haven’t mentioned many details of her recovery lately because we want her to share her progress in her own words through her book and on her blog.
Thanks once again for all of your love and support, and for your continued prayer.
Ron Luce is the founder and president of Teen Mania Ministries.
