Someone sent me the link to this video clip awhile back and I haven't been able to get it out of my mind since:
I find it pretty hard to watch that without getting a little choked up, and going by the responses of the judges and the audience, I'm not alone.
Your courage, your bravery, is “unbelievable” one of the judges tells the young man at the end of that clip. That's certainly true – he had a vision and he didn't let anything stand in his way. But there is also another person in this story whose bravery and commitment really stands out, and that is the mother who adopted those boys. To travel to war-torn Iraq, to rescue those brothers and bring them home for surgery, and then to take them in and raise them to adulthood in a loving home where she made it clear how much she believed in them – that, to me, shows amazing strength of character. What an extraordinary woman.
It's the same way I feel about the dentists who have stepped forward to donate their time through our Open Wide Foundation. They may not be adopting orphans, but what they are doing is something so much more than dentistry. They're helping people get a chance at a different, better destiny. And even though it's true that what they are doing is pure and selfless, it's not true to say that people who do things like this get nothing from it themselves. You only have to see the look on that mother's face while her son is singing to know that.