Chadapongu Rajesh sits cross-legged on the concrete floor of the bedroom he shares with the other boys who call this place home. He carefully sketches in the windows and doors, the final touches to his interpretation of the very building he is sitting in…Orphan Lifeline International’s Children’s Home in India…
He has learned about the new project HopeArt and is very excited that he and the other children can be a part of helping themselves…and other orphan children as well and he has volunteered to encourage the others and lead the way…envisioning his and their artwork on greeting cards…a message of hope to everyone who sees them and an expression of their value as a human being.
What Chadapongu will achieve in life remains to be seen. Perhaps he will become an artist as an adult or perhaps he will become a doctor or even the director of a children’s home. His future is unwritten and the opportunities are endless for this young boy, but that hasn’t always been true for him.
Chadapongu and his brother were brought to this home because their mother died and the only person left to care for them did anything but. Their father, a “drunkard”, beat the boys “without mercy” and their chance of survival in his house was slim at best…their very lives and who they would become was threatened on a daily basis by his cruelty and lack of care.
Even in and of itself it is nearly impossible to put a value on the life of a human being…although it is very clear how valuable each and every one of us is to God, it seems that it is often lost on us as individuals beyond our connection to family and friends. It is easy to allow it to escape our conscious thought, just how valuable and important each life is to another when it comes to strangers that have lost their lives, in our own hometowns, throughout the United States and around the globe.
Millions of people die each year and there is nothing that any of us could do about it…right!? We cannot control who is hit by a car, or dies in a plane crash or of some disease. We cannot control or have a part in saving the life of a soldier on a battlefield who falls to enemy fire or is killed in a fiery explosion from a bomb…or can we?
If you Google the name of James Harrison, the search results will return information about a two time Superbowl Champion Linebacker for the Pittsburg Steelers…and you can follow the links and read an entire biography about this athlete…
But you have to go quite a bit further if you want to read the story of James Harrison the hero!
74 year old James Harrison…”the man with a golden arm” is not a football player at all…nor has he ever been in spite of the above mentioned title. And you could research for hours and not find out anything about him before the age of 14…when nearly losing his own life transformed him from an ailing young boy into the hero of millions.
While lying on the operating table, James Harrison the boy received nearly 13 liters of blood that saved his life…and as he lay in the hospital for three months recuperating, he vowed to give blood on a regular basis when he turned eighteen.
And he kept that promise too…but the impact of it all was yet to be discovered…
Just after he started donating, it was discovered that his blood contained a rare and life saving antibody. At that time thousands of babies were dying every year in Australia from Rhesus Disease, wherein the mother’s and babies blood are incompatible as RH negative and RH positive.
Not only did his blood save thousands directly, but it was also used to help create a vaccine called Anti-D and it is estimated that he has helped save 2.2 million babies so far. James Harrison continues to give blood and as of September, reached the 1,000 donation milestone…and the lives he has and will save continue to grow exponentially…all because OTHERS donated blood that saved the life of a young boy whose name would have never had a return in Google otherwise.
You must also consider Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov, whose name and historical significance went unheard of and unknown of for 40 years after he made a decision that many agree, prevented World War III and therein saved the world from a nuclear war.
Vasili was born into poverty in a small village not far from Moscow…his family considered peasants. He joined the Russian Navy, becoming a mine sweeper and eventually an officer on a Soviet B-59 nuclear capable submarine.
It was October 27, 1962, the height of the Cuban Missle Crisis and the entire world was on edge as two nuclear superpowers had each other in their sights.
The submarine Vasili was in came under attack from U.S Navy destroyers attempting to force them to surface using practice depth chargers. The captain and other officers on the sub were convinced it was the start of the war and decided to launch their nuclear weapon on the United States. It was Vasili who refused to agree with the decision and ultimately convinced the other officers to “stand down: and surface, averting a nuclear strike and quite realistically, the start of a nuclear war in which the lives of millions would have been lost and the face of the world changed forever.
Chadapongu Rajesh is just a boy right now…invaluable to God, yet of no known significance to the rest of the world. Yet he and the thousands of other orphans that we and our partners provide for each and every day have untold future lives to lead…unknown contributions to give to the world they now have a chance to survive in and give back to.
Which one of them will be the next James Harrison…the next Vasili Arkhipov? That remains to be seen, but the unseen and unforseen connections we all have to one another on this earth cannot be denied. Beyond the fact that each of these children deserve a chance, deserve your love and care, simply as a human being, lies the reality that the life you save when you save theirs…just might turn out to be a soldier on a battlefield…someone about to be hit by a car…someone dying of a disease… the life of someone close to you…and perhaps even your own.
