Adebola A. Oni
Today I will like to share a very inspiring story that hammer home the point I’ve been trying to make in my last two pieces. It is a story I read years ago and it has always inspired me whenever I read it.
An impossible dream at a time came to a little black child living in an orphanage in Troy, New York. Her name was Dorothy Brown. When Dorothy was five years old, she was taken to a hospital for tonsillectomy.
Most youngsters would have been frightened, or at least apprehensive, but Dorothy wasn’t. She was fascinated by the wondrous world of medicine in which she found herself. People helping other people by relieving pain, setting broken bones, curing diseases. Then and there, Dorothy Brown decided that some day she would be part of that world. She was only five years old, but she set a goal for herself: Eventually she would become a doctor.
It was a dream that seemed absolutely hopeless. Born out of wedlock, she had been placed in an orphanage because her mother could not afford to keep her. It was understood that when she reached the age when other children enter high school, she would have to go to work. She had no friends outside the orphanage, no family, no connections of any kind.
And yet… And yet, something flickered inside this child, a tiny spark that became a flame. A flame that ignored all the odds, all the laws of probability. A flame breathed on by the Plus Factor, and consequently a flame that didn’t go out.
One day, this little girl, Dorothy Brown, asked the superintendent of the orphanage why she never had any visitors, as some of the other children did. That kind man mentioned this to some of his friends at the church he attended. The result was that a white family named Coffeen came to see the child.
When Dorothy told them she intended to be a doctor, they listened and they didn’t laugh. They felt her chances were non existent, but they still gave her attention and affection and encouragement.
As was the orphanage custom in those days, at the age of 14, Dorothy went to work as a maid, earning $14 a week. Two dollars a day. There were many books in her employer’s home, and she was allowed to read them. In two years, she saved $500, and decided to register for high school.
When the registrar asked for her home address, she had to admit that she had no job, no home, no address. But when a person has the aura of the Plus Factor about her, other people step forward to help, impelled by impulses that they may or may not understand.
The principal of the high school listened to Dorothy’s story. Then he found a couple who agreed to take her in as a boarder. She paid for her room as long as her money held out. When it ran out, the couple kept her anyway.
When she graduated from high school, she went back to being a maid in order to earn money for college. At the wages then being paid, she figured it would take her 11 years. But her faith in her dream never faltered. Every night she asked God to help her turn it into reality. She worked extra hours. She took on extra jobs.
Something gave her the endurance and energy she needed. I’m convinced it was the Plus Factor. One of her employers, hearing her talk of becoming a doctor, told her of a scholarship being offered by a small Methodist College in North Carolina. She applied for that scholarship and won it. She took all the science and pre-med courses that were offered.
But when finally she graduated, there was no money for medical school. When you are really in the flow of the Plus factor, when its invisible current is supporting and sustaining you, it sometimes seems that even the mighty sweep of world events reaches out to help.
The onset of World War II caused a shortage of manpower and the army turned to women with a background in science to work as inspectors in ordinance depots.
In two years, Dorothy Brown saved $2,000. It still wasn’t enough, but she could wait no longer. She entered Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee. When her funds ran out, friends came to her aid. And the day finally came when the friendless little waif from the orphanage in Troy, New York, was a doctor at last.
What does Dr. Brown herself think about all this? She believes quite simply that now she is living the dream that entered her mind when she was five years old. She believes that just as God gives each one of us our special talent, so he gives us dreams each one of us our special talent.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says, “how far fetched or unattainable the dream may seem. if we remain steadfast, if we have enough faith in God and in ourselves to go to work and stay at work trying to make the dream come true, the God puts into our lives the people who, out of their love for Him and for us, will do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.”
My friend, The story is quite lengthy, but I am sure you learnt so much from it. Please if you don’t have any dream, please BEGIN to dream NOW! You never can tell where it will lead you to.
You can see where Dorothy’s led her.
This is to your success as you become a dreamer.