Dr. Jackie Frisch has seen her share of what she readily calls miracles in her nearly 19 years of married life.
She and her husband Aaron had three sons after being told that they couldn't conceive due to her major medical issues. After adopting nine more children under various, improbable circumstances, Jackie's health worsened five years ago, at age 39, and she was told both in 2006 and 2007 that she had a short time to live.
Then, two years ago, the Frisches were chosen to receive a new, 4,000-square-foot home from ABC's "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" show. That miraculous gift came out of the blue to the large family dependent on Aaron's income as a Toledo, Ohio, firefighter and paramedic. But the bigger miracle, Jackie says, was what the community did to make it happen.
"What really did it was the 6,000 people who showed up" and gave their time and talents to help build a home for total strangers, she said Nov. 30 at Bluffton University, describing her family's resulting "extreme makeover of the heart."
The ordained minister and former youth pastor said she had heard "Love your neighbor" throughout her life in church, but hadn't extended it in her mind beyond the person next door. The volunteers who worked on her house-some of whom came from outside Toledo-changed her perspective.
"These people loved their neighbor in a way I could have never imagined," she admitted, saying there was, and is, "nothing we could do to deserve what's been done for us." The workers didn't come to see the stars of "Extreme Makeover"-who weren't at the west Toledo site that often-but rather, Frisch said, to do a good deed for people they had never met. And, "in just that act of kindness, they rocked our world. They changed everything," she added.
If they hadn't come, she explained, the family couldn't have taken in the most recent six of its now 15 adopted children, who have come from eight countries besides the United States. The six newest additions include children from Ghana, Germany, Zimbabwe, China and Haiti. The Haitian boy-the Frisches' sixth adopted son from the Caribbean nation-had been in an orphanage destroyed by the January 2010 earthquake. "Without those 6,000 people, he still would not have a home," she said. "Those 6,000 people gave my son to me."
"You have no idea what your one random act of loving your neighbor is going to mean in somebody's life."
After the "Extreme" experience, the Frisches decided that "not one moment would pass" without their taking the opportunity to change others' lives, Jackie told the Bluffton audience. For her, that has taken such forms as consoling a grocery checkout worker who was having a bad day and simply smiling at people on the street, she said, challenging her listeners, primarily students, to do likewise.
"There is a world out there where people your age are dying every day by the hundreds," she reminded them, referencing suicides, poverty and hunger. Continuing, she urged them not to fit the definition of "tolerant" that applies to becoming so used to something that you're no longer affected by it. People have "just become accustomed to not noticing" others' pain, Frisch said, but everyone needs to be noticed, and loved.
"The miracle that happened to us can happen to you," she said. "You can start an 'extreme makeover' in somebody's life."
Frisch, who earned a doctoral degree in ministry last August from Winebrenner Theological Seminary in Findlay, Ohio, doesn't know how much longer her health will allow her to continue promoting her newfound cause. But "I'm OK with that," she asserted. "It gives me the motivation to make today the best day ever."
