If You're Wondering About Your Fellow Humans...

...here's a story that will cheer you up.  Grab some Kleenex, and read:

In the grand scheme of prayer requests, theirs seemed fairly simple.

Dave and Melanie Stieglitz were asking for friends at their church to pray for the youngest of their three daughters, the one who was born with Down syndrome. Not that they wanted God to change anything about her. To the contrary, they were hoping, praying, to change those around her. Specifically to change her classmates at Fletcher High School. Not all 2,000 of them. Just one.

God, they asked, send a friend to Cara.

One friend.

Someone to sit with her at lunch.

At the time, Cara Stieglitz was 14 years old, a Fletcher freshman. And if you had wandered into the school and, just at a glance, tried to pick who was least likely to be named homecoming queen, you might have pointed at the girl who was eating by herself.

"As a parent, that pulls at your heart," Melanie Stieglitz said of picturing her daughter sitting alone.

So every Tuesday, she went to school and ate lunch with Cara. And on Sundays, they prayed that someone else would join her.

They never imagined that four years later Cara would be standing on a football field, wearing a purple dress that she and her mother picked out for homecoming. The court already had been narrowed from more than 80 nominees to 10 boys and 10 girls. One by one, the runners-up were announced. Then the king.

Jesse Hughes fits the traditional mold of a homecoming king. Star basketball player, 4.2 grade point average, good-looking, popular. He was the nominee of the senior class.

But the queen ...

Several television stations were there that night, so you may have seen video of the moment. The queen leaping up and down, her grin making the king's grin grow even bigger. Everyone in the stands on their feet. Parents dabbing their eyes. And not just Cara's parents.

The king said his mom was crying.

"And not for me," he said with a laugh.

So beyond prayer, how did this happen? How did Fletcher High become the scene of a story that feels almost too good to be true, like something straight out of a movie script? How did Cara go from sitting by herself in the lunchroom to standing by herself on the football field, the crowd cheering as the time-honored symbol of high school popularity was placed onto her head?

This is Cara's story. But it is also her classmates' story.

The rest of the story...