A little HOPE

Jimmy O’Neill, fifteen, has a lot to worry about. Born with cystic fibrosis, an inherited lung disease, he has been hospitalized five or six times a year since age six. Every day he takes twenty-five pills and spends twenty minutes in physical therapy.

Whenever he ahs a cold, he has to receive intravenous medication to fight off the infection. And if he feels a little sick, he immediately has to go to the hospital to see what’s wrong. “ My body is sort of like a car that everyone wants to keep in tip-top shape,” he explains. As a result, he often misses fifty to sixty days of school each year.

Jimmy also has a future to worry about. “I have to realize that, no matter what, I’ll never be totally independent,” he says. “There’s always going to have to be someone there for me.”

Yet Jimmy doesn’t worry. “There are some things in life you have choices about and there are things you don’t” he explains. “God will take care of whatever is going to happen.”

So instead of worrying, Jimmy has hope and faith in God. “You always have to have a little hope,” he says, “because if you run out of that, there’s nothing worth anything. You might as well give up right then and there.”

Jimmy O’Neill has learned how faith helps overcome worries. In contrast, the Istraelites in the desert worried about how to find food.

Read Exodus 16: 2-15 to learn how God took care of their worries.