Lord Howe Island, off Australia’s east coast, was once crawling with big, wingless stick insects about six inches long. Then in 1918 a shipwreck brought rats to the island, and the insects disappeared. For decades they were considered extinct. About 10 miles away stands Ball’s Pyramid, a rocky outcrop in the ocean. In 2001, scientists searching it found, in a single bush, three of the long-lost insects and a number of eggs. One scientist said it felt like being transported back to another time. A species everybody had counted as gone had been hanging on in one bush.
George Washington Carver was born into slavery near the end of the Civil War. As a baby he was stolen along with his mother, and only he was brought back, sick with whooping cough. He was frail as a boy, and a doctor said he wouldn’t live to 21. But he had a deep hunger to learn. He walked eight miles to school, worked as a cook and a laundry man to pay his way, and was turned away from one college because of his color. At one point, he wrote, he lived on “prayer beef suet and corn meal.” In a letter about his early life he summed it up simply: “I trusted to God and pressed on.” He became one of the most respected scientists and teachers in America.
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.
Wilma Rudolph was born premature, the 20th of 22 children, and as a little girl she battled pneumonia, scarlet fever, and polio, which left her with a weak leg and a brace. Because of segregation she couldn’t get treatment at the local hospital, so every week she and her mother rode a bus 100 miles round trip to Nashville. At home her family massaged her leg four times a day. By age nine she was walking without the brace. “My doctor told me I would never walk again,” she once said. “My mother told me I would. I believed my mother.” In 1960 in Rome she won three Olympic gold medals, the first American woman to do that at a single Games, and cemented her status as the fastest woman in the world.
As a teenager, Charles Spurgeon was miserable under the weight of his sin and kept visiting churches hoping somebody would show him how to be saved. On Sunday, January 6, 1850, a snowstorm drove him off the main road and into a little Primitive Methodist chapel in Colchester. Only a handful of people were there, and the regular preacher never showed up. A thin, plain man, Spurgeon thought maybe a shoemaker or tailor, got up and stuck to his text because he had little else to say: “Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.” Spurgeon later said that when he heard the word “Look!” he looked until he could almost have looked his eyes away. The young man who found Christ that day became the Prince of Preachers.
