At age 17, Jaquie Goncher went from being an active teenager to being paralyzed from the neck down in an instant when she dove into a pool and broke her neck.
"I can remember floating face down, and I thought I was going to die," Jaquie told the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
After her second surgery, the doctors told her mom the chances of Jaquie ever walking again were, "too small to put a number on."
This was in 2008. When she first moved her big toe, her surgeon was shocked. By 2012, Jaquie could stand and walk short distances, although it was exhausting to do so, according to an article by Flo and Frank.
She relied on hard work and God to make progress.
Jaquie and her now husband, Andy, met through an online dating site in 2013. Jaquie told Flo and Frank that Andy was "unlike anyone I'd dated before ... I knew he was the one not even half a year into our relationship. We just fit together so well."
When Andy proposed in August 2015, Jaquie had a goal to walk down the aisle and spend her wedding out of her wheelchair.
This brought on months of physical therapy, working out and faith.
"It was more than physically hard because I was an athlete ... I knew how I should be working out," Jaquie told Atlanta Journal Constitution. "And to do it halfway was emotional.
Walking down the aisle with support would be possible, but standing longer than that seemed impossible. Jaquie couldn't stand longer than 30 minutes, because of her low blood pressure, according to ABC news.
But she knew God would give her strength.
After more than a year and a half of work and prayers, Jaquie surprised her wedding guests by standing and walking down the aisle - and then standing for the next four and a half hours of her wedding.
She even got to dance with her new husband. (To Ingrid Michaelson's "The Way I Am," which is enough to make anyone cry.)
"There were tears everywhere," Jaquie told Buzzfeed.
A miracle had happened. Jaquie had beat the odds to have the wedding of her dreams as she married the love of her life.
"I prayed before our wedding that it would be a celebration of God and his mighty hand in my life," Jaquie wrote. "I prayed that our wedding would touch the lives of those who witnessed it. NEVER did I imagine it would be in this way. God's ways are exceedingly abundantly above anything I could think up or imagine!!!! May He FOREVER be glorified in my life!"
As the Goncher's story has hit the news, Jacquie wrote on Facebook that the most important detail has been left out: it was God who gave her the strength.
When writing about her miracles on Facebook, she frequently uses #makeGodfamous.
"I can't count the miracles I've experienced in the past 8 years during this journey," Jaquie wrote. "But above all the physical miracles, the strength and emotional courage the Lord provided and continues to provide me is the greatest of all. With every step I take, I never walk alone. Each time I fall, it is HIS strength that picks me up. And it is by His stripes that I will run again."
