Someone You Should Know: Blind Chaplain Jim Thompson
(CBS) – You could call him a wounded healer. He's a priest who serves the sick, and he has a disability of his own.
CBS 2's Harry Porterfield says Father Jim Thompson is someone you should know.
Little Company of Mary Hospital in Evergreen Park: Fifteen years ago, Thompson would join the others here in the business of healing as a priest chaplain. Then he began losing his sight.
"Every once in a while you feel like putting your fist through the wall because you can get really frustrated," he says of the disability. "I think there is a doubt in the mind of a person who is blind or limited, disabled, in some way. What can I do? Is there something that I can actually do?
It turns out there is something he can do. He visits regularly with patients like Laura Kikos. She fell and broke her leg in three places.
Father Thompson has been a great comfort, she says.
"He just made me safe feel safe and secure to know that through him the Lord is with me," Kikos says.
Afternoons, Thompson will join those who gather in the hospital chapel to celebrate Mass.
"I am a wounded healer," the priest says. "I carry this cane because sometimes it doesn't look like I'm blind – to remind people I don't see well. And from that they're able to relate to me because of the disability."