Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers didn’t just want Jackie Robinson for his talent. He wanted him for his character. Rickey knew the man who broke baseball’s color line would face mental and physical abuse, and he needed someone strong enough to take it without fighting back. On April 15, 1947, Robinson played first base for Brooklyn in his major league debut. He faced teammates and crowds who didn’t want him there, plus threats against himself and his family. He handled it with honor and grace. At the end of that first season, he was named Rookie of the Year. Holding back when you could swing isn’t weakness. It takes more strength than most people will ever know.
When Pete Gray was six, he was hitching a ride on the running board of a produce truck. The driver stopped suddenly, Gray fell, and his right arm got caught in the wheel spokes. Doctors had to amputate above the elbow. Most folks would figure baseball was out. Gray figured out a way. He stripped nearly all the padding out of his glove, wore it on his fingertips, and learned to catch the ball, tuck the glove away, and throw in one quick motion. In 1944 he hit .333 for Memphis and stole 68 bases. In 1945 he made it to the major leagues with the St. Louis Browns. After the season he visited military hospitals and spent time with wounded veterans and amputees. What he lost became the very thing God used to encourage others.
In the summer of 1944, nearly 200,000 Jews were still left in Budapest, and the authorities planned to deport them too. Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish businessman with no diplomatic experience at all, arrived on July 9 as a diplomat at the Swedish legation. He started handing out certificates of protection that put Jews under neutral Sweden’s care. He set up hospitals, nurseries, a soup kitchen, and more than 30 safe houses. When thousands were forced on marches toward the Austrian border, Wallenberg often went in person to get people with papers pulled out of the columns. When Budapest was liberated, more than 100,000 Jews were still alive there, mostly because of him and his colleagues. God can use someone who feels unqualified. He just needs someone willing to show up.
As an enslaved boy in Baltimore, Frederick Douglass had a mistress who started teaching him the alphabet. Then her husband found out and shut it down. He said it was unlawful and unsafe to teach a slave to read, because reading would make him unfit to be a slave. Douglass heard every word, and it hit him like a revelation. If his master feared reading that much, reading had to be the pathway from slavery to freedom. So he found new teachers: the little white boys he met in the street. He carried bread with him on errands and gave it to the hungry kids, and they gave him what he called the more valuable bread of knowledge. What was meant to hold him down became the very thing that lifted him up.
Anthony Robles was born without a right leg. He tried a prosthetic, but at age three he pulled it off and chose crutches instead. At fourteen in Mesa, Arizona, he found wrestling, and by his own account he was the worst wrestler on the team. He kept working. He went 96-0 his last two years of high school and won two state titles. Few colleges gave him a chance, but he went to Arizona State anyway. As a senior in 2011, he went 36-0, won the NCAA championship at 125 pounds, and was named the tournament’s Outstanding Wrestler. Robles proved what he’d been saying all along: life is about what you can do, not what you can’t.
