On January 2, 2023, in front of a national TV audience, Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin made a tackle against the Cincinnati Bengals, stood up, and collapsed. His heart had stopped. Within seconds the medical staff were on the field, and assistant athletic trainer Denny Kellington, who had joined the Bills in 2017, started CPR. Doctors said Hamlin lost his pulse and had to be revived with CPR and a defibrillator, and that the quick response saved not only his life but his brain function. Head coach Sean McDermott said Kellington stepped up and took charge, and he credited him with saving Damar’s life.
Paul Alexander caught polio in 1952 when he was just six years old, and within days the disease left him unable to breathe on his own. He spent the next 70-plus years in an iron lung, a seven-foot metal cylinder that pushed air into his lungs. Most people would have quit dreaming right there. Paul didn’t. Holding a rod in his mouth, he learned to turn pages and paint. He went to high school, college, and law school and worked for years as an attorney. Later he used that same mouth rod to type out his own autobiography. When he died in March 2024, a friend said Paul would want everybody to know they are capable of great things.
On Christmas Eve 1968, at the end of one of the most painful years in American history, Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders became the first humans to orbit another world. Borman later said they were told they would have the largest audience that had ever listened to a human voice, and NASA’s only instruction was to do something appropriate. So while the camera showed pictures of the moon and the Earth, the three men took turns reading the first verses of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” They closed by wishing a merry Christmas to everyone on the good Earth.
Elisabeth Elliot and her husband Jim were missionaries in Ecuador, and their daughter Valerie was born in 1955. In 1956, Jim and his fellow missionaries were killed by the Waorani people they had been trying to reach with the gospel. Elisabeth could have gone home. Instead she kept serving among the Quichua people, and in the fall of 1958 she, little Valerie, and fellow missionary Rachel Saint were invited to live among the very people who had killed her husband. She went, carrying the love of the same Savior her husband had died trying to share.
