I believe that every single person on earth is blessed with a unique talent, a special calling, and should spend a lifetime - if it takes that - searching to identify and fulfill their dream. Mine, as I found out some years ago, is trying to tell stories. Nothing gives my heart more of a thrill and my soul more redemption than sharing a wonderful story that I hope will cause a similar tingle.

Some days I’ll receive over 250 emails – honest -- and, as of yesterday afternoon, I had 5,280 unopened emails that I haven’t had a chance to read.

I mourn that I can’t reply to many of the personal ones, simply because of time constraints, but I read anything I think is personal. Those left unopened are usually ones that have been “forwarded” from others who want to share what they’ve seen.

Trust me, I get some dandies, which (finally) brings me to an afternoon earlier this week when I opened an email from a kindred soul that was titled “A Voice With A Story.” It was actually a YouTube video of a teenager who appeared on an Australian version of the “X Factor” talent show in September of last year. I can safely guarantee you it will make you cry, just as it has over 8,900,000 viewers across the world since the show first aired last fall.

It is a tape of a handsome boy who is called Emmanuel Kelly, but that is not his real name. Nobody knows for sure who he really is because he was found by nuns after being abandoned with his infant brother in a Baghdad park. The two small infants were found in 1995 in a shoebox – that’s right, just a shoebox -- because they were victims of the chemical warfare Saddam Hussein once unleashed upon Iraq.

Emmanuel and his brother are horribly disfigured, missing hands and legs and ravaged by birth defects, but a modern-day saint known as Moira Kelly crossed their path. Moira, a nun, is an Aussie girl who left home at age 20 to work with Aboriginal children. Two years later she worked alongside another nun, Mother Theresa, in Calcutta, and suffice it to say her gifts to the world since then are absolutely incredible.

Anyway, she bundled up these two Iranian orphans and took them to Australia where she has a big farm in Victoria that “just so happens” to be a stunning rehabilitation mecca for children like the “shoebox boys” from all over the world. As a matter of fact, Emmanuel Kelly (pick up on his new last name) was the first child in Australia to have a successful hand-foot transplant.It turns out Emmanuel soon learned to speak with an Australian accent but his amazing voice knows no country. It is his calling, his unique gift, and he sings all the time, just for the fun of it. His prep school mates tell him to “cool it” when they are studying but the immensely-engaging boy who walks on prosthesis and cradles a microphone in what was once a misshapen foot just laughs and giggles and sings.

So now we get to the X-factor show this past August. The cameras pick him up as he is nervously approaching the judges and one, Ronan Keating, asks his age. “I am not exactly sure,” he said candidly. “When I was found in an orphanage by my Mum, there was no birth certificate … I have no surname, either.

“My story is that I was born in the middle of the war and I and my brother were left in shoe boxes in a park. We were in the middle of gunfire … those noises we didn’t understand,” he explained with neither emotion nor a grimace. Obviously the other judges were already reeling by the scene now unfolding. Spice Girl Mel Brown, Natalie Bassingthwaighte and Guy Sebastian wore “deer in the headlights” expressions, but when Keating asked, “What are you going to sing?” and Emmanuel calmly replied, “Imagine … by John Lennon,” you can hear Keating’s emotion when he audibly groans, “Aw, man ….”

The music begins:

“Imagine there’s no heaven,

It’s easy if you try.

No hell below us, Above us only sky,

Imagine all the people,

Living for today ... “

I suspect by now you are getting the picture but you can’t feel simply my words, not with Emmanuel Kelly. So as I direct you to http://www.youtube.com/embed/W86jlvrG54o?rel=0

Allow me to share that the X-Factor darn near went down in a riot when he was voted off the show several weeks later. But I also want you to know Yoko  Ono, the widow of the famed Beatle, happened to see the tape and Tweeted young Emmanuel, “Thank you! You sang beautifully. John would have been proud of you. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Love, Yoko.”

Since then, in the way these things turn out, Yono Oko has arranged for Emmanuel Kelly to come to America where – believe me – big things await but, first, get somewhere quiet and watch the tape. It will make you cry. That’s because it has everything to do with a boy finding his dream and learning it is very real and very, very true. Just imagine.

 royexum@aol.com