JESUS'S Kids

Well, another Labor Day weekend has come and gone and along with it another Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon. My family has watched them from the very first, I think, and I can remember as even a young boy feeling a sense of awe that Jerry Lewis, the crazy guy my family laughed at in so many movies, cared about handicapped kids. I didn't have the same disability (Muscular Dystrophy) that "Jerry's Kids" had, but just thinking that he acknowledged handicapped kids being out there meant something to me as I struggled with my own limitations.

On the down side, I am convinced to this day that the reason I can't do simple math is from my brain being fried trying to figure out how huge stars and corporations donated 20 million dollars at a clip, one on top of each other, but the "tote" board" lagged behind by millions and millions of dollars, yet no one seemed to notice or care. My conscience would smack me in the head and say "Shaddap, and go pay your dollah!" (We both came from the Bronx, my conscience and I) so I'd stick my dollar in an envelope and go traipsing to the Post Office, even though it was closed for the holiday, to help "Jerry's Kids."

I heard a few years ago that "Jerry's Kids" rebelled. Some of the people with muscular dystrophy protested that Jerry Lewis was taking advantage of their condition by parading them before the cameras and trading on their misery. I could never see how. And I never heard him promote himself or any of his projects on the telethon until this year when he promoted a 2008 Broadway version of his old movie "The Nutty Professor." He said today he almost died again 8 months ago, so if he thinks he can live another two years, Mazel Tov. But other than that I don't see what he has to gain from the telethons. At any rate, it seemed ungrateful for his "kids" (patronizing as that term is) to turn on him like that when no one would know what MD is and they certainly wouldn't have the kazillions of dollars they made for research in the past 50-somehting years without him. He was just a scrawny Jewish guy trying to do a good thing and being rejected by the very people he was trying to help whom he lovingly referred to as "his kids."

But the irony is that he's not the first. There was another Jewish Man who was "despised, rejected, and well acquainted with grief." Yeshua. But this Man, YESHUA / JESUS, was also fully GOD as well as fully Man; all of creation was made through Him and for Him. Yet the people He made for that world wanted nothing to do with Him. "He came to His own, but His own received Him not." After all He'd done for "His kids", they wanted nothing to do with Him. To those who did (and do) receive Him, though, He gives "the power to become the sons of GOD."

I pray to GOD there is a cure for Muscular Dystrophy soon. But even if there is, and there are no more bodies twisted by it, no more lives shortened by it, those mortal lives will some day end and the bodies will all too soon cease to function anyway. But to those who believe in JESUS, there is life everlasting. No matter how limited the flesh or short the life flame in it flickers, there is more if only we will accept the only cure that has been available all the while in Him. Eternity for the accepting.

Jerry sat on his stool and sang, "When you walk through a storm...", as he does every year. I sang along with him, as I do every year, and we both choked on the words together. This stormy life has lots of hurts. Broken bodies and shortened lives, suffering children and broken dreams. But JESUS alone offers the cure beyond comprehension that we can only accept with childlike faith. He who came to earth as a human being and suffered along with us knows how it feels. And because He conquered death for us, now and forever, we truly will "never walk alone...We'll never walk alone."