I knew the pain and uncertainty cancer caused, the cold, hard fear, but I’d just never gotten around to donating to this marvelous institution. I’d thought about it, but my attitude was “let someone else donate to the cause.” Not a good stance to have, I know. It was time to live and learn.
I’d also never prayed to St. Jude with such fervency until today. And St. Jude had never performed a miracle in my life until today.
Here’s what happened. My husband and I are involved in a hopeless family situation. I can’t go into it too much, but let’s just say it’s an impossible predicament which concerns our daughter and her unemployment issue.
We were driving to lunch, and I finally admitted out loud that we were indeed in a hopeless situation. This prompted me to think of St. Jude, the ‘Patron Saint of Impossible Causes’. If you’re Catholic, you’ve heard of this man. If not, he’s the saint to pray to when the going gets tough. I remarked that we were going to have to pray to St. Jude every night.
Why wait until tonight? I thought and began to pray to him right then. “Dear St. Jude, we lay our daughter at your feet. Please come to her assistance.”
My husband and I then had lunch at our favorite restaurant. I was treating us because it was the end of my semester at school. We didn’t discuss the problem while we ate.It was as if we wanted a respite from the issue.
As we were driving home, something told me to call our friend Dan, whom we called “Dan the Man.” Long story short, he was the one who could help us with our problem as he had just become a job coach for the high school where he worked.If anyone could help, Dan could.
Putting us in touch with Dan was the miracle I believed that Saint Jude had performed.
I called my mother to tell her. “Yep, that’s a miracle.” In her 92 years, she’d seen a few.
“How should I thank St. Jude?” I asked her.
“Give to his hospital.”
Christmas 2023 was the holiday prayers were answered, and cancer was central in my life again. Only it wasn’t my cancer. It was the cancer of little children hundreds of miles away.
I silently prayed that my monetary gift would be multiplied somehow as Jesus had multiplied the bread and fish to fed thousands.
Because I knew in my heart that it was Jesus who was empowering Jude to perform his miracles.
To save the hopeless.
To do the impossible.
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