By Steve Givens
Last year, after watching a documentary film about the legendary children’s broadcaster Fred Rogers, I was eager to learn more about him, which led me to author and journalist Tim Madigan’s 2006 memoir of his friendship with Mr. Rogers, I’m Proud of You. The memoir is a beautifully told story of this mostly long-distance friendship that began when Madigan (rather reluctantly) was assigned to write an article about the American icon for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
From that first interview blossomed a friendship of incredible depth, compassion and intertwining of families, and that was especially true when Madigan’s brother, Steve, was diagnosed with a rapidly growing — and ultimately fatal — form of lung cancer. As I turned the pages of this deeply touching memoir, which has since been turned into a play that made its world premiere at the Circle Theatre in Fort Worth in October 2023, my eyes landed on a familiar title: Living Faith.
In November 1998, shortly after Steve received the results of a biopsy and its accompanying prognosis, his mother handed him a copy of Living Faith. The devotion for that very day is a reflection on Jesus’ parable of the grain of wheat that must fall to the ground and die before it can bear fruit. Within the devotion for that day are these lines:
If the grain of wheat could know fear, it would be paralyzed with anxiety at the thought of being dropped in the ground, covered over, put out of sight, doomed to inactivity, yet what a glorious harvest awaits it….All the while, God is whispering gently in our hearts saying: “Let go, dear one. I want to make something marvelous of you. Loosen up. Drop what is in your hand, your mind, your heart, and let me take over. I love you and have plans for you that are beyond your wildest imaginings. Only you must let me be in charge.”
Steve was so struck by the message that he read it out loud to his family while standing at the dining room table and later had it framed and “kept it near him as a talisman, reading it several times a day,” Tim Madigan writes.
Although Steve had not been a particularly spiritual person, his encounter with his disease, treatment and death changed him in ways he could have never imagined and he began to speak “with the wisdom of a mystic, describing his cancer as the best thing that ever happened to him,” Tim writes. Faced with this news, he was ready to become “a grain of wheat ready to surrender himself to the great farmer.”
When Tim related the story of Steve’s great change to Fred Rogers, the broadcaster was characteristically kind, gentle and faithful to his Christian beliefs.
“Jubilate Deo! (Praise God!),” he wrote to Tim. “Steve has already known what healing is all about. That’s the best kind of all….We never know, do we? Every day is a gift to each one of us…no matter what our present prognosis happens to be.”
