One of my online forums has been praying for a little girl named Molly, gravely ill. She passed away this morning, but I wanted to mention something from her Facebook page:
Miley Cyrus just called Molly!!!
I went through the comments and found more:
Miley went to a lot of trouble to make this call tonight and a lot of amazing people at DreamWorks made it happen.
I will tell you straight-up that I know nothing about Miley Cyrus. Or rather, I know she’s an actress and a singer and that my niece likes her, but beyond that, nothing. I’d have recognized her name but not her work, and I know nothing about her private life.
But now, and for the rest of my life, I will know that in the last 24 hours of a 7-year-old’s life, this celebrity carved out time from her schedule to get on the phone with a dying girl and talk with her and make her very happy. I may never hear one of her albums or see anything she stars in, but she will always, always be branded in my head as the celebrity who telephoned a dying child.
There are a few celebrities whom I think of that way. When you hear ‘Yoko Ono’ you may think about John Lennon and the Beatles, but I think of the woman who donated hundreds of backpacks and jackets to Covenant House.
I don’t know if every celebrity realizes the power they have when they do something that maybe to them isn’t all that much, but to someone else is everything. Maybe Miley got off the phone and sobbed. Maybe she didn’t want to do it because she didn’t know what to say. But she did it. She called her twice. She reached out. She gave a little girl her wish.
My prayers are with the family, and may God bless Miley Cyrus in whatever way she may need.
Thank you for pointing out how much someone like Miley can do with a little effort, but longlasting effect. Let’s hope she is a model and inspiration for more of this type of action.
Someone today told me that Justin Bieber will spontaneously drop by children’s hospitals and visit the patients. (I hope it’s okay to spread good gossip — I found a news report about him visiting a pediatric cancer patient at Boston Children’s. http://www.dana-farber.org/Newsroom/News-Releases/justin-bieber-dream-date-shines-light-on-rare-pediatric-cancer.aspx)
That’s incredibly amazing for such young kids to have a social consciousness. I know Dustin Hoffman is always doing anonymous good deeds. There’s probably more of this than we know about. They have to protect against the onslaught of requests they’d get.
I take these altruistic actions as prrof of a spiritually evolving society.
I hope so. That would be wonderful.