Superheroes

Ever play superhero when you were a kid? Wouldn’t it be cool to have super powers and melt stuff with your eyes, or have bullets bounce off you? Unfortunately we grow up and life shows us that there are no superheroes. At least I thought there weren’t until tonight.

I went to the Kidney Foundation’s Gift of Life dinner and benefit that honored “living” donors. My brother-in-law Jim is a living donor. He gave a kidney to his friend Ollie. He met Ollie over 23 years ago when he was first getting sober. Jim is an alcoholic, and a few other things, back in the day. But he turned his life around and joined AA and found sobriety, and his version of God.

Ollie was there and helped him through it. He was recovering himself, and had been sober for about 10 years when they met. Their friendship grew as Jim became stronger in his sobriety. Ollie saved his life.

23 years later Ollie had been on dialysis for a long time. Without kidneys his health was poor. He was weak. Gaunt. His blood system was polluted and it made him very ill.

Jim couldn’t see his friend go through this, so he told Ollie, “Take one of my kidneys.” After a series of tests that confirmed a match, the doctors spent about 3 hours taking one of Jim’s kidneys and placed it in Ollie.

The Bible teaches us that there is no greater love than for someone to lay down their life for a friend. John 15:13. That kind of unselfishness seems foreign in this world of excess and “I gotta get mine.”

It was interesting sitting in a room of people who had donated a piece of themselves, who sat next to the person that received their gift. The love between them all was very evident, and their stories were astounding: a daughter who donated to her mother so that her own daughter would have a grandmother for just a few years more. A son who donated to his father because he knew it was the right thing to do to repay him for all that his father had done for him. A wife who gave to her husband, out of love. And a man who prayed for his friend to get a kidney, and then God told him “give him yours.” The stories went on and on about how these people gave of themselves.

And Jim, he unassumingly stood up and said, “It was the right thing to do. God expects no less from all of us.” He returned his friends kindness of 23 years earlier when he helped him into sobriety and saved his life. Now he had saved Ollie’s.

Superheroes. Yes, they really do exist. I sat in a room full of them tonight.