The story goes that years ago, a man named Danny Thomas was struggling to support his young family because his entertainment career was in rough shape. He finally decided that it was time to give up his dream and find a stable job with a steady paycheck.
On the night before what was to be his last audition, he went to a church and prayed to St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. Thomas promised in prayer that if he somehow got the job from the next day’s audition, he would be so grateful that he’d open a hospital for children with cancer.
Thomas got the job and went on to have a successful career as an entertainer for many years. And he held true to the quiet vow he made that evening in the church. He opened a children’s cancer hospital and named it St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. It is a wonderful place. Children with cancer receive top-notch treatment by top doctors, expense-free. Today, St. Jude’s is one of the top children’s hospitals in the country.
My mother recently visited St. Jude’s hospital located in Nashville, Tennessee. She didn’t know anyone being treated there; she was familiar with Thomas’s story and wanted to check out this special place. While there, she purchased a few St. Jude medallions, which are supposed to bring hope to those facing “lost causes.”
Shortly after my mother returned home, she learned that a friend of a friend’s teenage boy had been in car accident that left him in a coma. My mother was moved by the story and the plight of the young man who’d been in the coma for a month. She gave one of the St. Jude medals to her friend and asked her to visit the boy and set the medal on his bed. The woman did as my mom asked, and the next day, the boy awoke from his coma. True story.
Now, I’m not writing this story to get you to believe in the power of St. Jude medals. I think your beliefs will dictate whether you feel my mother’s and her friend’s actions were answered by some higher being or whether they were coincidental to the recovery. I don’t know who is right. To the family, the cause of the recovery is of little consequence. Their son is awake and alive. They thanked God, they thanked my mom’s friend, and they thanked my mom. Maybe they just have plain old fate to thank.
It’s too easy—and misguided—to get lost in debating the cause of the recovery in terms of religious beliefs or lack thereof. Because in focusing on trying to be right and prove a point, we miss the true beauty of the story: the boy’s awakening and recovery.
What I find almost as amazing as his recovery, is that my mother had the thought (some would say prayer) and belief that she could change a stranger’s fate simply by wanting it to change. The medal carried hope: my mom’s and my mom’s friend’s and then the family’s. Maybe somehow the selfless, loving intention influenced the recovery.
A faith and belief chain was formed in this boy’s life by total strangers to him: my mother’s faith was shared in some way by whoever phoned 911, by the operator who dispatched the call, by the paramedics who rushed the boy to the hospital, by the hospital personnel who took him in and cared for him every moment in the hospital, by the boy’s parents who dropped everything else in their lives and stayed by his side every day since the accident, and by the family friend who transported the medallion and placed it on the boy’s bed.
Without the efforts and the underlying belief of these people, the boy would very likely have died.
Too often we are an “I’ll believe it when I see it” society. This complacent attitude is defended as being realistic. I don’t know if that’s true but it does seem to be destructive. It is the opposite of faith, which sees the possibility of things that are not in front of our noses. Our world depends on this more than we know. The “show me and I’ll believe” attitude is inherently flawed because no creation is ever manifested before it’s begun. Negativity breeds destruction. The world we live in depends on positive belief, hope, and faith to continue. If we depended on cynicism and negative thought, we would destruct and cease to exist.
