Thomas Dorsey was a blues piano man who later gave his life to gospel music. One hot August day in 1932 he left his pregnant wife Nettie in Chicago to sing at a revival in St. Louis. After he sang, a messenger handed him a Western Union telegram: his wife had died. Back home he learned Nettie had given birth to a boy, but that night the baby died too. He buried them together in the same casket. Dorsey said he didn’t want to serve God anymore or write gospel songs. A few days later a friend took him to a quiet room with a piano, and as his hands moved over the keys, the words came: “Precious Lord, take my hand.” It became the most famous of his songs.
George Müller lived a wicked life as a young man in Germany before he was converted at about age 20. Later, as a preacher in England, he made a decision: he would never take a salary or ask anyone directly for money. He would tell his needs to God alone. In 1834 there was room for only about 3,600 orphans in all of England. Müller started taking them in at Bristol, and over his lifetime he built five large orphan houses and cared for 10,024 children. He never took out a loan or went into debt, and neither he nor the orphans ever went hungry. When he died in 1898, his own possessions were worth only a few hundred dollars.
For a long time scientists believed the coelacanth had died out with the dinosaurs, about 70 million years ago. They knew it only from fossils. Then in December 1938, a South African museum curator named Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer came across a strange fish that had been caught in a trawl net near the mouth of the Chalumna River. It was five feet long, with steel blue scales and odd, fleshy, limb-like fins. She knew it was something special and wrote to fish expert J.L.B. Smith, who was stunned. It was a living coelacanth. It was hailed as the most sensational natural history discovery of the century. Something everybody had written off as long gone was alive the whole time.
In the summer of 1988, wildfires burned across huge stretches of Yellowstone. Many people grieved, convinced the park they loved was ruined. Lodgepole pines make up nearly 80 percent of Yellowstone’s forests, and some of their cones are sealed shut with resin. Those cones won’t release their seeds until the resin melts at about 113 degrees Fahrenheit, which usually means a fire. The fire clears away the litter on the forest floor and opens the canopy to sunlight, just what the seedlings need. Decades later those burned slopes are covered with young forests again. The very thing that looked like the end is what released the next generation.
