The Five-Fingers Club

A teen helps a younger boy see that their shared difference is no handicap to success.

- Matthew Bain

JAYCE CROWDER began noticing when he was in kindergarten that he looked different from his classmates. They had two hands. He had one.

It started when one boy teased him, says his mother, Cortney Lewis. Jayce’s bubbly enthusiasm soured to sullenness. He’d return to their Des Moines, Iowa, home with questions: Why am I different? Why me? Why?

“He actually told us he was mad at God for making him that way,” his mother says. “That was a huge dagger to the heart.”

Lewis admits she didn’t know what to do at that point. How could she provide answers to her son’s questions when she had never found those answers herself?