Jacob is a healthy fourteen-year-old from Massachusetts, an athlete who lives and breathes for baseball, football & hockey, when he is stricken by an awful and mysterious illness. What begins as a typical childhood malady swiftly proves to be anything but routine. Jacob's folks, Keith and Alethea, the busy parents of four other children, find themselves thrust headlong into the trial of their lives. Their entire world is suddenly torn asunder.
From his doctor's office, Jacob is rushed by ambulance to an Intensive Care Unit. What began as an average-every-day cold has graduated to pneumonia. But this is no ordinary pneumonia. Three days later Jacob is on life support. Within a week, his death is all but imminent. Nothing can be done. Doctors struggle feverishly to solve the mysteries Jacob's body hurls at them, while Keith and Alethea, staggered by the suddenness of it all, lean on their faith and on the army of supporters who have come to their aid - to pray with them, to cry with them and to hope with them.
Jacob's father, a faithful man, a Gulf War veteran and a career prison officer, has been hardened over the years and has lost some of his faith in the goodness of humanity. The outpouring of unfettered love and kindness that he experiences from his family, his friends and from strangers during Jacob's ordeal, however, lifts him, nourishes him and opens his heart. Through social media, Jacob's plight touches the hearts and draws the hopes and the prayers of thousands. The army becomes legions. It almost seems as if there is purpose in what's happening. Somehow, Jacob's illness seems to serve as a vessel for love and for goodness in the hearts of people.
Weeks pass as the whirring machines stream life into Jacob's ravaged body, which has been whittled to the bone by the sinister disease that attacked him. Jacob's lungs are obliterated by the savage pneumonia, the likes of which the medical staff at the renowned Boston Children's Hospital had rarely seen. All appears lost as his parents cling to the promise of their faith. Keith does what no parent should ever have to do as he writes his son's eulogy in preparation for, and in acceptance of, the inevitable.
The love of Jacob's Army, though, stretches across the country until it finds a deeply spiritual man half a nation away who contacts Keith to share a powerful experience which overcomes him when he prays for this groaning family, and this dying boy, who he had never met or known. Then...things change.
Take the incredible and heart wrenching journey with Jacob and his family through the pages of The Gift of Tears. Feel the love and the goodness in the human heart. Ponder the mystery of faith. Join the brotherhood of community and the fellowship of hearts. Experience the embrace of healing. Hold their hands. Love with them. Laugh with them. Cry with them.
Believe in hope. Believe in healing. Believe in miracles.
Believe.
