Singing To Johnny

Singing to Johnny

Christine was proclaimed one of the outstanding singers in America. She had big offers from record labels and was looking forward to a full schedule of concerts. Her agent predicted that she would be a recording star. Singing was her life and performing was her passion.

Everything changed that harrowing night Christine gave birth to baby Johnny. The doctor was inexcusably drunk. He broke several of the baby’s bones as he pulled him from the birth canal. The violence of that delivery resulted in severe hemorrhaging of the newborn’s brain. The inebriated obstetrician would lose his license to practice and later commit suicide. But that didn’t help Christine’s baby.

During the first year, eight doctors said that he could not possibly survive. For his first two years, she had to feed him every three hours with a special feeder. It took more than an hour to accomplish each feeding. During those two years Christine never left her home. She didn’t get more than two hours of sleep at any one time. The voice that enraptured thousands now sang simple lullabies to a child with severe disabilities.

Johnny lived twenty-four years. He was totally paralyzed, only able to sit in a wheelchair with the assistance of a full-length body brace. Convinced that God had called her to care for her son, Christine never went back to the concert stage. She bathed, clothed, and lifted his limp body in and out of the wheelchair, spoon-fed him—and above all, sang to him.

Christine’s husband, John Edmund Haggai, is a noted evangelist, author, and global missions leader. He wrote her story in his moving book My Son Johnny. What amazed him most was the way Christine showered their son with unconditional love for more than eight thousand straight days. She never once resented the fact that her music career died the day Johnny was born. She felt that God had given her a voice to sing her boy into heaven. Even more amazing was the fact that she never complained that she was marooned in a small world with a helpless son who demanded every ounce of her energy and patience.

But the thing that most impressed John Haggai was that he never once heard Christine say an unkind word about the doctor who injured her son and destroyed her career. In fact, she wept when she heard that he had committed suicide. Her forgiveness of that obstetrician was as complete and unconditional as her love for Johnny.

Her husband proudly said that at age forty, after years of unending servitude, Christine possessed the youthful sparkle that would be the envy of any high school senior, and the charm and beauty for which any debutant would gladly give a fortune. Haggai believed that her ability to forgive made her more beautiful. Isn’t that what makes Jesus so immeasurably beautiful? Nowhere do you see that more than when Jesus forgave those who crucified him. When we fail to forgive those who have hurt us deeply, or resent circumstances that derail our dreams, we need to remember something that Martin Luther King Jr. often said:

Forgiveness is not an occasional act but a permanent attitude.

He has removed our sins as far from us as the east is from the west.

Psalm 103:12