Faith, Hope and an iPhone App

By Tracy Grant
The Washington Post

The purchase of a calendar is the single greatest act of faith I have ever witnessed.
My husband, body sapped by cancer but will unyielding, had me wheel him from his hospital room at Georgetown University Hospital to the university bookstore. He needed a calendar, he explained, to keep track of upcoming projects at work. It didn't need to be an elaborate organizer, he went on, because he would only need it until "I get my iPhone." One last time his crystalline blue eyes gleamed with life, with hope.

It was March 2007. He would be dead in six days. He would never record a single entry in the calendar we bought that day. Apple's first iPhone would not be sold for another three months.

I wept on June 29, 2007, the day the iPhone was introduced. Wept because I wanted nothing more than to be waiting in line to get him one, wept because God had not granted this mad-about-all-things-Apple geek his last wish.

Sometimes it seems that understanding death has become my life's work. Certainly trying to help our twin sons -- 11 when they lost their dad -- understand the ways of God has dominated the last few years. So last spring when the boys needed to do a service project in preparation for their Confirmation, it seemed like one of those teachable moments, an opportunity to make the linkage for them that good can grow from the unspeakable.

So together we came up with the idea of creating a charity called "Rosaries for Research." It grew from words of wisdom from our parish priest: "Act as if everything depended on you, pray as if everything depended on God." The boys would distribute rosaries, asking people to pray for a cure for cancer and to make a small donation if they could. All donations would go to cancer research.

So armed with hundreds of rosaries (ordered from rosarymart.com -- who knew?), Ziploc bags and slips of paper explaining the project, Andrew and Christopher turned the den into an assembly line that Henry Ford would have been proud of. They spoke about their project at a Mass at the Georgetown University Hospital chapel. At their home parish, they set up a poster, a basket filled with rosaries and a donation box in the church vestibule. They collected and counted and after a month, they sent more than $1,300 to the Lombardi Cancer Center and the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health. Their child-like wonder at the kindness of strangers proved to them and me that good can come from the unspeakable.

But midway through this fairly traditional fund-raising effort, Christopher announced "Mom, I want to turn Rosaries for Research into an app for the iPhone." Clearly, the mad-about-all-things-Apple gene had been passed on.

So we bought the iPhone App Developers Program and a book about iPhone coding, and Christopher went to work. He enlisted the help of a friend to take just the perfect digital image of a rosary. He created a tab on the app explaining the history of the rosary, on another tab he wrote about the correct way to pray the rosary. He designed, tested and tweaked. He fought through technological glitches and had conversations with iPhone developers at Apple. And at age 13, he succeeded in getting the computer giant to approve his app for sale on iTunes.

As an app, it's pretty basic. But what it lacks in bells and whistles, it makes up for in heart and in its simple message of faith: that through prayers and actions, the world can be changed.

Those of us who call ourselves people of faith sometimes claim to see the hand of God in events that the more rational among us recognize as mere coincidence. I don't know that I see the hand of God in what Andrew and Christopher have done with Rosaries for Research. But I do see an act of faith as profound as the purchase of that calendar, an act of faith that proves that even death cannot break the bond between a father and his son.

Bill didn't live long enough to get his iPhone, but thanks to Christopher, he has an iPhone app created in his memory. And as I struggle with the life's work of making sense of death, I recall Isaiah's words, "And a little child shall lead them."

Rosaries for Research is available for download on the iTunes store for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The cost to download is 99 cents. All proceeds (70 cents per download) will be donated to the Lombardi Cancer Center and the National Cancer Institute.

Tracy Grant is Weekend and KidsPost Editor for The Washington Post

By Tracy Grant |  October 2, 2009; 3:25 PM ET Save & Share:                 
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