THE HANDS PEOPLE PRAY FOR; A True Story
Bob Butler lost his legs in a 1965 land-mine explosion in Vietnam. He returned home a war hero. Twenty years later, he proved once again that heroism comes from the heart.
Butler was working in his garage in a small town in Arizona when he heard a woman’s screams coming from a nearby house. He began rolling his wheelchair toward the house but the dense shrubbery wouldn’t allow him access to the back door. So he got out of his chair and started to crawl through the dirt and bushes. “I had to get there”, he said. It didn’t matter how much it hurt. When Butler arrived at the pool there was a three year old girl named Stephanie Hanes lying at the bottom. She had been born without arms and had fallen in the water and couldn’t swim. Butler dove to the bottom of the pool and brought little Stephanie up to the deck.
Her face was blue, she had no pulse, and was not breathing. Butler immediately went to work performing CPR to revive her while Stephanie’s mother telephoned the fire department. She was told that the paramedics were already out on another call. Helplessly she sobbed and hugged Butler’s shoulder.
As Butler continued the CPR, he calmly reassured her, “Don’t worry, he said. “I was her arms to get her out of the pool. It will be O.K. I am now her lungs. Together we can make it.” Seconds later the little girl coughed, regained consciousness, and began to cry.
As they hugged and rejoiced together, the mother asked Butler how he knew it would be O.K.
“The truth is I didn’t know”, he told her. “But when my legs were blown off in Vietnam, I was alone in a field. No one was there to help me except a little Vietnamese girl. As she struggled to drag me into her village, she whispered in broken English, ‘It OK. You can live. I be your legs. Together we make it.’ Her words brought hope to my soul and I wanted to do the same for Stephanie.”
The moral to this story as it was told: There are simply those times when we cannot stand alone. There are those times when we need someone to be our legs, our arms, our friends.
I’d also say as a chiropractor, there are times when people are sick, suffering, are losing hope, and praying desperately for answers. At that point, God sends a chiropractor; to be the hands they need to get well. Will you be those hands?
A chiropractic angel story. Years ago, I heard of the untimely death of a fellow chiropractor who died in an automobile accident. Often times it is hard to rationalize such unfortunate events. Our hearts go out to his lovely wife and 4 children. Perhaps his young son had as good a guess as any as to how to make sense of such things. He said about why his dad had to go to heaven: “I guess GOD needed an adjustment.”
Remember, with God – all things are possible,
Dr. Ben Lerner