Life Saving Blood

Shortly after the first edition of the Miami Herald had gone to press on Sunday night, December 29, 1946, Timothy Sullivan answered the telephone on the city desk. “Please help me,” a woman’s voice pleaded. “My husband is bleeding to death.”

Sullivan got the entire story. The man’s name was Rudy Kovarik, from Dearborn, Michigan. They were on a vacation but he was sick and in the Biscayne Hospital. The AB RH-negative blood he needed was not available at the hospital or other sources. Without a transfusion, the doctors thought he might not live until morning.

What could the city editor do? A man was dying. A woman’s heart was breaking. Then he got an idea—WCBS, fourteen blocks away, where it was almost time for Walter Winchell to go on the air in a nationwide broadcast. The operator at the radio station refused to let him talk to Winchell, but, after some insistence and pleading, she put an assistant of Winchell on the phone. He took a memo of the situation and Sullivan sat back to wait.

Soon the telephones began to go mad. The Herald office, the police station, the hospital were all swamped with calls from all over the nation. People as far away as New York City began to board planes for Miami, the corridors of the Biscayne Hospital were crowded and traffic jammed the nearby streets as would-be donors tried to get to the hospital.

The actual donor was a tourist from New York who heard the broadcast on his car radio, checked his Army dog tags for blood type, and drove two blocks to the hospital. In a few minutes his life-giving blood was flowing into the veins of the stricken man. A few weeks later a healthy-looking man walked up to the Herald’s city desk to thank Timothy Sullivan.

Tan, P. L. 1996, c1979. Encyclopedia of 7700 illustrations : [a treasury of illustrations, anecdotes, facts and quotations for pastors, teachers and Christian workers]. Bible Communications: Garland TX

Opening the Fifth and Sixth Seals - Revelation 6:9-11

Let Him Hear Who Has Ears to Hear- Sermon

Four Horsemen of Tribulation (Revelation 6:1-7)

What can you give?

Bill Wilson pastors an inner city church in New York City. His mission field is a very violent place. He himself has been stabbed twice as he ministered to the people of the community surrounding the church. Once a Puerto Rican woman became involved in the church and was led to Christ. After her conversion she came to Pastor Wilson and said, "I want to do something to help with the church’s ministry." He asked her what her talents were and she could think of nothing---she couldn’t even speak English---but she did love children. So he put her on one of the church’s buses that went into neighborhoods and transported kids to church. Every week she performed her duties. She would find the worst-looking kid on the bus, put him on her lap and whisper over and over the only words she had learned in English: "I love you. Jesus loves you."

After several months, she became attached to one little boy in particular. The boy didn’t speak. He came to Sunday School every week with his sister and sat on the woman’s lap, but he never made a sound. Each week she would tell him all the way to Sunday School and all the way home, "I love you and Jesus loves you."

One day, to her amazement, the little boy turned around and stammered, "I---I---I love you too!" Then he put his arms around her and gave her a big hug. That was 2:30 on a Sunday afternoon. At 6:30 that night he was found dead. His own mother had beaten him to death and thrown his body in the trash......."I love you and Jesus loves you." ....Those were some of the last words this little boy heard in his short life---from the lips of a Puerto Rican woman who could barely speak English. This woman gave her one talent to God and because of that a little boy who never heard the word "love" in his own home, experienced and responded to the love of Christ.....

What can you give? What is your "colt". You and I each have something in our lives, which, if given back to God, could, like the colt, move Jesus and His message further down the road.

SOURCE: Mark Adams, "The Roads He Walked - Palm Avenue."

A Star on my Crown

There was a family with one little daughter. Mother and daughter were very faithful in church and Sunday School attendance The father wasn’t interested and he made it plain it was okay for his wife and daughter, but not for him. He worked in a steel mill, a huge hulk of a man who had been a football player at Ohio University. The daughter, Susie, became ill and was taken for diagnosis to the family doctor. She had leukemia and as it was in an advanced stage it was too late to save her. The family was to take her home, care for her as comfortably as possible before she died.

Each night on coming home from work, Susie’s bedroom was her father’s first stop. He would visit and spend some time with her. Daily her condition worsened and she lost weight, her cheeks were sunken and her color looked very bad.

One night in particular, Susie had obviously been doing some serious thinking, and she asked her father, "Daddy, I know I will die soon and go to be with Jesus. My Sunday School teacher told me that. But, Daddy, when I get to heaven I will be given a crown to wear. And my crown will have no stars because I have not led anybody to know Jesus. So, Daddy, will you give your life to Jesus so I can have a star in my crown?" The father, through the tears, nodded his head and right there prayed a sinner’s prayer of commitment. It made Susie’s eyes light up with joy! She called for her mother and told her what Daddy had just done.

A few days later she passed away. On the next Sunday morning came Susie’s daddy with her mother walking together into church. Time was taken for a "testimony" in the service and this man stood and said, "May I say a few words?" The preacher assured him, "Yes, go ahead." The man went on, "I was resistant to the Gospel and had rejected pastors and evangelists who had tried to lead me. I could reject anyone but my little daughter." He paused to wipe the tears away and went on, "Because she asked me and because she loved me, I gave my life to Jesus. She reached me when no one else could."

Then, just before he sat down he looked upward and finished with this, "And now Susie is in heaven, wearing the crown promised to her and a single star in her crown û that’s me!"

Francis of Asisi kissed the leper

"Francis of Assisi was terrified of leprosy. And one day, full in the narrow path that he was traveling, he saw, horribly white in the sunshine, a leper! Instinctively his heart shrank back, recoiling shudderingly from the contamination of that loathsome disease. But then he rallied; and ashamed of himself, ran and cast his arms about the sufferer’s neck and kissed him and passed on. A moment later he looked back, and there was no one there, only the empty road in the hot sunlight. All his days thereafter he was sure it was no leper, but Christ Himself whom he had met."

—G. K. Chesterton

Loving the needy people is loving Christ. Feeding the hungers, caring the poor, helping the weak, and showing compassion to the needy people is the Lord's will and the fruits of our faith. Do you care?