According to folk wisdom, the first thing one should do when one falls off a horse is to climb back on.

A few weeks ago, some friends - a husband and wife - had the rug yanked from beneath their lives. Matt, the husband, left their house to go somewhere and forgot that he was supposed to take out the garbage on the way out of their house. Sarah, his wife, did it instead.

Their home has a detached garage behind which the garbage cans live. When Sarah walked behind the garage with the garbage bag, she was attacked by someone lurking in the woods behind their house.

No one is quite sure what her assailant's weapon was, but it was likely a baseball bat. She was struck on the side of the head, breaking her orbital bone and damaging her eye. Her attacker then dragged her into the woods, where he apparently intended to rape her.

Sarah remembers nothing from the attack except one thing...her mother always told her that if she ended up needing to defend herself from a male attacker, she should use her knees. This she did, and it apparently worked.

She vaguely remembers waking up in the woods and wandering back to her house, where she called 911. They rushed her off to the local hospital. Thankfully, aside from the damaged eye, none of her other injuries were serious. The eye, however, needed the attention of a specialist, so she was airlifted to a hospital better equipped to handle the situation.

There are apparently only a handful of surgeons in the nation who can do the surgery they needed, and as luck would have it, one was on staff at the second hospital. She was rushed into surgery and after several hours, emerged with a little hope that her eyesight would recover.

After she was released from the hospital several days later, she was in church with Matt when she suddenly started getting dizzy and complained of a severe headache. She got up to leave the service and collapsed.

They carted her off to the hospital again, where they discovered that she'd suffered some bleeding behind her eye. After a few more hours in surgery, the news was not good. The bleeding had done so much damage to her optic nerve that there was no chance she'd ever regain sight in that eye.

Matt and Sarah are strong people, each with a tremendous sense of humor and a lot of faith in God. There was never any question that they'd be fine in the aftermath of all this, no matter what the outcome. What happens happens, and they both know that there's nothing left but to meet the challenge and move on.

On Saturday night, they held a Halloween party, and their guests were all asked to wear pirate costumes. Eye patches were handed out at the door.

That horse has a rider again.