Philip's wish for a soccer field in his basement

Make-A-Wish entered our lives with a knock on her front door. I remember it like it was yesterday. Our wish couple greeted us with a smile and they said to us "wish big and we will wish even bigger."

This all came at a poignant time as I had recently been diagnosed with an inoperable malignant brain tumor. We were hopeful as a family but still in shellshock regarding the heavy news. It was the right spot my family and I needed exactly when we needed it most. I wished that my parents' basement could be transformed into a soccer field, and that was no easy task. Fast-forward several months in when I came home from an indoor soccer game and all of my friends and teammates surprised me for the big reveal. Make-A-Wish had painted a huge mural of me playing soccer in a stadium on the wall and given me toys soccer balls to play with in the newly reimagined space.

Make-A-Wish helped to provide a light of hope when my family needed it most. We befriended our wish granting volunteers and were dear friends with them until they passed. We got thousands of hours of playtime out of our transformed basement and created countless memories I will not too soon forget.

This year will be 27 years of defeating childhood brain cancer, and it's long been on our hearts to write a book about my journey. It was my wife's conviction this past year that we needed to begin with a children's book-phrasing my journey through the lens that a child battling something similar could understand and resonate with. I want to spread a message of hope from the mountaintops and allow other families to share in that same conviction that miracles do in fact happen.

This book, called “Philip’s Miracle: An Adventure from Diagnosis to Hope”, is now published and available to purchase online. And as a part of this book project, we felt convicted to donate $1 of every book sold to Make-A-Wish. I’m very excited to share this with you, as a wish kid myself