E-mail
Print
RSS
G-bookmarks
Live
Technorati"Mom, I'm seeing these spots."
John soon started to get dizzy at school. A few months later, doctors determined that the tumor was growing again and spreading out in his brain.
"I almost lost all my faith when I heard this news," John confided in his journal. "But later on that night I sat down with God and had a long chat. I asked him are you testing my faith, is it my time and what did I do? All those questions, though, I learned were from the devil, and all I had to do was keep faith in the Lord and he would heal me."
Meanwhile, a doctor's referral had put John on the Make-A-Wish radar. And that's how it was that Fenger phoned and finally persuaded Joanie to let her come by to talk to John, who was eager to tell her about his wish.
___
As Fenger tried to figure out how the charity could help, John's health got worse. But he never complained or moped or got mad. When people told John they would pray for him, he'd tell them right back that he would be praying for them, too.
One of those people praying for him was a young pastor named Orlando Cabrera. John's uncle attended the Summit Church, where Cabrera preached. John went there sometimes, and he liked Cabrera.
One day Cabrera asked if he could come to the house to pray with the boy. During the visit, Joanie urged her son to talk about his wish. John explained how he wanted to help kids in Africa somehow, maybe even go on a mission trip.
Naturally, Cabrera wanted to know why. Why wouldn't John want to take a vacation or do something else fun? The wish was supposed to be just for him, after all.
John propped himself up on the couch so he could look at the 33-year-old pastor.
"Orlando, God didn't allow this to happen to me so I would get something out of it," he said.
Cabrera decided then that other people needed to know about this kid — and his wish.
In early June, the pastor returned with a video camera. He thought he'd show the video to his congregation, then maybe appeal for donations to benefit the church's African missions and outreach.
John, as bad as he felt by then, liked the idea, too. This could work.
He sat down at the end of the dining room table and faced the camera.
"Hi, I'm John Halgrim. I'm 15 years old," he began.
His head pounded, he was dizzy and sick to his stomach, and his face was puffy from the steroids. Nevertheless, he sat for more than an hour to talk about his cancer and God and the kids in Africa and his dreams for them.
"I know that he's got something great planned for me," John said. "And I know he wants me to do this."
___
Doug Ballinger couldn't believe what he was seeing when a friend at Summit Church showed him the video. The 68-year-old retired businessman was moved by the boy's spiritual maturity and selflessness.
He also realized that he might be in a unique position to help.
Ballinger, who had moved to Fort Myers from Memphis, recently had taken his first mission trip to Nairobi, and he couldn't get out of his head the poverty and the suffering children he saw there. He and his son, J.D., who'd been doing African missions for years, formed a charity and called it Help the Least of These, the name taken from a verse in the book of Matthew.
Father and son had helped build a new church that doubled as a schoolhouse in a Nairobi slum. They decided their next project needed to be a small orphanage. So many children are parentless in a land where violence, starvation and disease kill most adults before they reach their mid-40s. But they needed to raise the money. Continue »
brianager »
Agree: 
Disagree: 
