The history of some lives is true example. While some people justify their own failure by the difficulties that embrace them, in the first years of childhood or adolescence, others attest to their victory, facing the most adverse issues possible.

Mario Capecchi is one of these examples. In 2007, he was honored with the Nobel Prize for Medicine, together with his colleagues Oliver Smithies and Martins Evans.

They were rewarded by their discoveries related to embryonic stem cells and the recombinant DNA in mammals.

Mario Capecchi was born in Verona. He lived in the Tyrolean Alps and, when he was only three and a half years old, he saw his mother be carried out by the Gestapo.

She was an anti Nazi poet and, sensing she could be caught, she sold everything she had and gave the money to a few chicken farmers of Tyrol, to nurturing her son, if something bad were to happen to her. 

For about a year, Mario was taken care by the farmers but, because the money ran out or any other reason, the boy was put in the street.

Thus, from the age of four and a half years old until nine, Mario lived on the streets, with a group of kids. What he recalls, of those times, is that he lived with hunger.

He ended up being hospitalized, during a whole year, in a hospital of Verona, bearer of typhoid fever, caused by poor nutrition. 

With the end of the war, his mother Lucy was finally released, from the concentration camp of Dachau and, after long searches, she found him.

Later, they moved to Philadelphia, in the United States, where Lucy had a brother. And it was only then, at the age of thirteen, that Mario learned to read. He devoted himself with tenacity, studied and made progress.

The experience of difficult days of an abandoned childhood, of the bitterness suffered in the streets, took him to grow.

Today, professor at the University of Utah, in the United States, demonstrates that all the experiences that were adverse for him, he used for his progress.

And he smiles. Smiles always. Nothing to cry bitterness, no parking on the painful past.

To his students, he teaches that in order to achieve something it requires effort, patience and perseverance. He is the living example of what he teaches.

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Pain is a blessing that God sends to his elected. We must be patient. Patience is also a charity and we must practice the law of charity taught by Christ, sent by God. 

The charity that consists in the alms given to the poor is the easiest of all.

Other there is, however, much more difficult and, therefore, much more laudable: to  forgive those whom God has placed in our path to be instruments of our suffering and bring us to the test of patience.

Life is difficult, with certainty. Is consists of a thousands of nothing, that are many other pinheads bites, but that eventually hurt.

If, however, we keep alert to the duties that are given to us, to the consolations and compensations that, on the other side, we receive, we have to recognize that the blessings are more numerous than the pains.

The burden seems less heavy, when we look up to the High, than the one from when we curve to the earth.

Let us be patient, perseverant. Let us be victorious.

Spiritist Moment Team, based on biographical data
of Mario Capecchi and on item 7,  from chapter IX of
the book O Evangelho segundo o Espiritismo,
by Allan Kardec, publisher FEB.
October 23, 2014.