1. Families in Tiny Texas Town Have Adopted 77 Hard-to-Adopt Kids Inspired By Their Baptist Church Leaders
On the 4th of July, over 2,000 theaters across America ran the film adaptation of the incredible true story from a small town in Texas that adopted 77 of the most at-risk children from the regional foster system.
Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot, recounts how the voice of God led a pastor and his wife to adopt two children, and then to convince the congregation in the town church to follow their lead. It wasn’t a large community, but nevertheless, the 77 children found families within the 23 households of Possum Trot, Texas.
Oprah, the Today Show, and Good Morning America all jumped on the story, but it was years later when Hollywood director Josh Weigel and his producer wife Rebekah approached Bishop W.C. Martin and his wife Donna Martin, whose faith and determination led to the most mistreated children finding loving homes, did the story make it to the silver screen.
“When the church actually does what we’re called to do, it’s beautiful,” Mrs. Weigel said in a behind-the-scenes promotional video released by Angel Studios. Mrs. Weigel brought the whole production team down to Possum Trot to meet and interview the families and children at the center of the drama before initiating a screenplay rewrite to better share the community’s story.
The foster system in America is, as Mr. Weigel explains, ground zero for most of the childhood trauma in America. It is ground zero for child trafficking and a primary driver of both the prison population and homelessness.
“And think about how many children [are] in the system, I believe if every church were focused on two or three children, they would fix the system just like that,” said Bishop Martin.
2. Nurse Credited for Saving Man’s Life with CPR and Defibrillator After Heart Attack in Charlotte Airport
Like so many victims, the first sign that Ken Jeffries was vulnerable to heart disease was a heart attack—suffered when the 57-year-old was at the airport waiting for a flight.
Collapsing to the floor of the Charlotte Douglas Int. Airport, he has his lucky stars to thank for his flight being bound for Knoxville—the same place that Claire Cerbie, a registered nurse from a heart and vascular hospital center in Charlotte, North Carolina, was going.
Cerbie told news media that it was the way he was breathing and snoring that alerted her to the heart attack. With a makeshift orderly staff of airport bystanders, Cerbie administered CPR while someone went to get a defibrillator.
“We put the pads on him,” Cerbie told WBTV News. “It indicated a shockable rhythm, and it shocked him in between while we were doing compressions.”
After he recovered his own pulse, Jefferies was rushed to the Atrium Health Carolinas Medical Center where Dr. William Downey, a cardiologist at the Sanger Heart & Vascular Institute, where Cerbie actually works, performed life-saving surgery.
Neither nurse nor doctor believed Jeffries would have survived if not for the CPR and shocks administered by Cerbie and the good Samaritans who helped.
3. ‘PET Pirates’ Remove Seven Tons of Trash from Hungarian Lake in Plastic Picking Competition
It looked to be a grand day out on Lake Tisza in southern Hungary, where another edition of the PET Cup was held to great success.
The competition, sponsored by local and large businesses alike, saw hearty ‘PET Pirates’ plundering the high seas of the country’s artificial lake in search of treasure: plastic waste.
Short for polyethylene terephthalate, or the most commonly used plastic for bottles and containers, the PET Cup started in 2013 as a way to inspire residents to keep the lake clean, and has since been held at other waterways as well.
The pirate captains crewed makeshift barges in search of trash, which when seen in a flotilla seems reminiscent of the Mad Max and Road Warrior films, only on water rather than a highway.
This year’s edition saw over 20,000 pounds of trash pulled from the lake by the various teams, with the winner coming from the MBH Bank team.
