Many who come forward to receive the Body and Blood of Christ do so with their eyes closed or cast down. Not James "Butch" Murphy of Saint Agnes Parish in Sawyer, Michigan. When this big man with a big crucifix steps forward to receive the Eucharist, he looks upward and smiles gratefully at the dear friend he made in 1970 when he gave his life to Jesus. It is the same look he had when he met Pope John Paul II, Mother Teresa, and the multitudes to whom he has carried his charismatic renewal ministry throughout the world.

Murphy, who earned the nickname "Butch" because he was 10 pounds at birth, has witnessed for Christ in missions at his home parish in Sawyer, Michigan, and at conferences, workshops, and retreats throughout the world. Everyone who has ever met him has a "Butch story," probably even the Holy Father and the late Mother Teresa whom he served as a bodyguard, but the best Butch stories by far are the ones he tells on himself.

When he was diagnosed as having a malignant tumor in his left kidney in late 1999, Butch Murphy just smiled and told his friends that he thought he'd do just fine with only one kidney. Indeed, prior to having his left kidney removed at Lakeland Medical Center in St. Joseph, Michigan on January 12, 2000, Butch resolutely donned his special "Run for the Roses" t-shirt. "That t-shirt is now a vestment for me," he explained. "I only wear it on days of struggle, victory, and challenge, and my date with surgery was such a day."

The t-shirt, which also bears the image of race horses dashing across the finish line, has its genesis in a 10K running race in Howell, Michigan in the early 1980s when Butch was entered in the second road race of his brief running career. "My younger sister Kathy, who loves horses and who I love, said she was going to come and cheer me on. She competed in horse shows in suburban Detroit, and she was always singing the lines from a Dan Fogelberg song that was popular then: 'Run for the Roses.'

"But something came up, and she wasn't going to be able to make it, so there I was all alone out on this hilly, tough course in the open country. There were no reference points for me to work off, and I didn't think I was going to make it. "But I'm stubborn, so I said I'll die before I stop, and then I came over the top of a hill and saw the finish area. I was coming down to the floor of a valley and thinking of how Kathy said horses always keep going, and Kathy suddenly popped out of the crowd and yelled: 'You can do this! Keep going!' She had changed her plans so she could come and cheer me on. I finished that race, and I adopted that song about running for the roses as my theme song."

Butch Murphy was so synonymous with Dan Fogelberg's ditty about racing horses by 1989 that when he finished a 1,000 mile walking mission across his home state of Michigan, he was presented with the aforementioned t-shirt that he wore to the hospital for his surgery. Going into surgery he also wore a hearty smile and had the whole staff laughing hysterically before they put him under for the first major operation in his 48 years of life.

His wife Sue said he ate a hearty meal of barbequed ribs the night before his surgery and said he insisted on driving the family van to the hospital. While she was waiting to see him after his surgery, she said people around the world were praying for his recovery, including his adorable three-year-old son John Patrick.

Why? Because Butch Murphy is a big man with a big heart who wears a big crucifix around his neck. He has carried the cross of Jesus in missions across the country and, as stated previously, across his native state of Michigan. As founder and president of Vera Cruz Communications, he has brought the "true cross" of God's love to churches, parish basements, convention halls, living rooms, and street corners the world over.

Butch Murphy has served the Church of his childhood in numerous capacities at the parish, diocesan, national, and international levels. He is the former chairman of, and currently, a consultant to the National Service Committee for the Catholic Charismatic Renewal.

He is the producer of THE CHOICES WE FACE, a weekly television program of Renewal Ministries, and as past chairman of the Youth Executive Committee for the North American Renewal Service Committee, he helped evangelize the throngs attending the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.

No stranger to the Vatican, the globe-trotting Catholic evangelist is a member of the International Catholic Charismatic Renewal Service, based in Rome. As one of Butch's many friends in high places, the Most Reverend Sam G. Jacobs, Bishop of Alexandria, Louisiana has stated in writing: "Jim has done excellent work in youth ministry throughout the country and is an excellent conference speaker and leader. He is orthodox in his teachings and gifted in his sensitivity to where people are. He is a man of prayer and vision."

This man of prayer and vision was born in the Detroit suburb of Wyandotte, Michigan and attended 12 years of Catholic school at St. Frances Cabrini School in Allen Park, Michigan. He was led by his older sister Marilyn to a personal relationship with the Lord in 1970. "I was still in high school, and she had come home from college for summer vacation, and she surprised us all by volunteering to do the dishes. My sister Marilyn was the family whiner and had never volunteered to do the dishes. Now she was not only doing the dishes, but had a whole new attitude on life. When her boyfriend dumped her that summer, I got mad and told her I'd be happy to let the air out of his tires to get even. But she stopped me, and said we should pray for him instead.

"Marilyn wasn't whining anymore, and then on Tuesday nights she started inviting six or seven friends over, and they'd go down into the basement. Being the curious little brother, I spied on them and saw that they were sitting in the dark in a circle going, 'Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus. I thought they were on dope or something. Finally, I asked my sister what had made her so happy, and she said she had accepted Jesus Christ as her personal Lord and Savior."

Butch asked her if that was Catholic, and she assured him that it was. And so he followed his sister's good example, and, in a poetic gesture of love, Marilyn was there in the hospital January 12 to give thanks with him as he came out of surgery. Getting back to Butch's curriculum vitae, please know that he completed his education at Wayne State University School of Social Work in Detroit and received his bachelor's degree in Social Work in 1976. He panned for gold in Alaska, did archaeological research in Central and South America, and worked in grocery stores, restaurants, auto shops, charter boats, construction, and as a delivery truck driver.

He can discuss opera and world literature in Spanish as he once did while living in Columbia, and he played guitar in a band and continues to use his virtuosity on the instrument and his golden voice as part of his ministry.

Shaped by his late father's vocation as a Sea Captain, Butch also received training as an undersea salvage diver at Diver's Training Academy in Fort Pierce, Florida. He often brings his diving equipment on missions to young people and is particularly fond of brandishing his diver's knife to the awe of his young audiences and proclaiming: "This knife is just like the Holy Spirit -- it helps you cut through things."

Now that he is recovering from cancer surgery, Butch Murphy is finally slowing down and tending to one of his greatest but perhaps least known gifts -- writing. He has finished the first three chapters of a book about the extraordinary 4,200-mile walk he took across America carrying a six foot cross, and his wife says she intends to hold her energetic husband to his computer keyboard until he finishes telling how he wore out 14 pairs of shoes and himself on an 18-month long journey of prayer and evangelization from St. Augustine, Florida to Sonoma, California.

Incidentally, the 12-pound cross he carried was made from Florida cedar with a crossbeam hewn from a fig tree from Sonoma. It is best to leave the details of this epic mission through nine U.S. states and one Mexican state to Butch himself. But be it known that he touched countless people including a "hopeless drunk" he found sleeping on a park bench in New Mexico. Butch and his companions prayed with the man because, as Butch recalls, "I no longer saw the town drunk; I no longer smelled the stench or saw the filth. I saw only a man needing to be loved."

When Butch returned a week later to check on the man, he found a total transformation. "He was shaved, had a haircut and was cleanly dressed. When I asked him what happened, he said: 'I don't understand, but I finally came alive. Guess what? I went to church, and I know I'm home.'"

It should be noted that Butch completed that incredible journey just months before Sue got the "confirmed Irish bachelor" to the altar on December 19, 1994. Sue Murphy is glad for her husband's long walks for the Lord, but she's now looking forward to his more leisurely literary journeys in the comfort of their rustic cottage near Lake Michigan.

"Butch has been traveling so much over the last few years, that John Patrick and I have become used to not seeing him for long periods. I always show John Patrick on a map where his father is on a mission, and once, when Butch was in Hungary, the teacher at pre-school asked John Patrick where his father was. John said he was in Hungary, and the teacher thought he meant that he was hungry, but then John Patrick went to a map and showed her that his father was indeed in Hungary.

"But now, with this surgery, we can go to a map and point at Sawyer, Michigan and say that's where Butch is. With us and working on his book, tapes, and booklets," Sue said with a hopeful sigh.

The multitudes who have been spell-bound by Butch's oral delivery surely know that his writing style will be as equally compelling. In fact, he is already a published author, having penned and self-published a practical and readable booklet titled, 17 STEPS TOWARD BETTER COMMUNICATIONS WITH YOUR TEEN.

His wife Sue says "It's the Irish in him. He's got the gift of storytelling. No doubt." Case in point. At the funeral Mass for his dear friend Janet Zientarski on a snow-bound January morning in 1999, Butch Murphy delivered a homily that touched every heart present. Noting that Janet had suffered greatly from cancer before her death, Butch assured her grieving husband Bob and all those present that Janet's suffering had not been in vain.

Butch said she was transformed through her suffering and had come to know the fullness of Jesus Christ. "We all like the image of the Risen Jesus in his clean robes, and we all like the baby Jesus and the child Jesus, but when we come to fully know Jesus -- as Janet did and does -- then we meet a Jesus who is bloody and has a terrible crown of thorns on his head. He comes to us and bends down to kiss us, and when he does so, those thorns pierce our foreheads, and we bleed and suffer with him," Butch said.

As the snows, which Janet dreaded, drifted and swirled outside, Butch assured Bob and the four grown Zientarski children that Janet had run her race and was at home with the Lord. Pointing his finger at the sky, he smiled and said: "You go, girl! You go!"

That's the kind of Christian Butch Murphy is, and that's why his brothers and sisters in Christ the world over are praying for his speedy recovery from cancer.

"You go, Butch! You go!"