A friend of mine and I were doing our morning walk a few years ago, when he told me about this seventeen year old boy in Mulund who had been diagnosed with blood cancer.

“I know someone else who had the same disease and came out of it,” I said. “let’s bring the two together.”

“Supposing it doesn’t work, and the young boy doesn’t survive?”

“We have to take that chance,” I said, “what we are going to give the family a small beam of light, a glimmer of hope, with which they can build on.”

Brigadier General Robinson Risner (“Robbie”) spent seven years as a POW at the “Hanoi Hilton,” as prisoners of war called their North Vietnam compound. There he discovered the power of hope. He spent four and a half years of that time in isolation. He endured ten months of total darkness. Those ten months were the longest of his life. When they boarded up his little seven-by-seven foot cell, shutting out the light, he wondered if he was going to make it. He had already been under intense physical and mental duress after years of confinement.

And now, not a glimmer of light shone into his cell – or into his soul.

Robbie spent hours a day exercising and praying. But at times he felt he could nothing but scream. Not wanting to give his captors the satisfaction of knowing they’d broken him, he stuffed clothing into his mouth to muffle the noise as he screamed at the top of his lungs.

One day Robbie got down on the floor and crawled under his bunk. He located a vent that let in outside air. As he pressed against the vent, he saw a faint glimmer of light reflected on the inside wall of the opening. Robbie put his eye next to the cement wall and discovered a minute crack in the construction.

It allowed him to glimpse outside, but was so small that all he could see was one blade of grass. A single blade of grass and a faint ray of light. But when he stared at the sight, he felt a surge of joy, excitement and gratitude like he hadn’t known in years. “It represented life, growth, and freedom,” he later said, “and I knew God had not forgotten me.” It was a tiny glimmer hope that sustained Robbie through an unbearable ordeal.

The human spirit is strong. It seems to run forever on nothing but a morsel of hope. Without it, you have nothing. With it, nothing else matters.

Let us look around and see to whom we can give a glimmer of hope. It may be a small beam of light we can throw, but that glimmer could be the beginning of wonders and miracles.

Flash that small beam of light for someone today..!

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