Jim Abbott grew up in Flint, Michigan, born without a right hand. He became a left-handed pitcher anyway. People could have told him a thousand reasons he’d never make it to the big leagues. On September 4, 1993, pitching for the New York Yankees at Yankee Stadium, Abbott threw a no-hitter against Cleveland, winning 4-0. He walked five, struck out three, and got 17 outs on ground balls. “A guy, growing up in Flint, Michigan, to this?” he said later. That afternoon nobody in the stadium was thinking about what he was missing.
When Scottish sprinter Eric Liddell learned that the 100 meter heats at the 1924 Paris Olympics would be run on a Sunday, he refused to take part, even though the 100 was his strongest distance, and news of his decision travelled around the world. He spent the next months training for the 400 meters instead, took bronze in the 200, and then, running blind from the outside lane in the 400 final, won gold in an Olympic record 47.6 seconds. “With the help of God, I ran the next 200m even more strongly,” he later said. Liddell then went back to China as a missionary and died at 43 in a Japanese internment camp in February 1945, just months before the war ended.
Louis Zamperini was an Olympic runner who survived a plane crash, weeks adrift on a raft in the Pacific, and brutal treatment in Japanese prison camps during World War II. He came home a hero, but inside he was eaten up with nightmares, drinking, and dreams of strangling his old guards, and his marriage was falling apart. In 1949 his wife finally got him to a Billy Graham tent meeting in Los Angeles, and he remembered the promises he had made to God on that raft. He gave his life to Christ, and he said the nightmares stopped. Later he went back to Japan, sought out his former captors, and told them he forgave them.
Hiroo Onoda was a Japanese army officer sent to Lubang Island in the Philippines near the end of World War II with orders never to surrender. The war ended in 1945, but he refused to believe it. Leaflets were dropped and search parties were sent, and he dismissed every one of them as a trick. He stayed in the jungle for 29 years, still fighting a war that was long over. Finally, in March 1974, his old commanding officer flew in and personally told him he could stand down.
In November 1873, Anna Spafford and the couple’s four daughters sailed for Europe on the S.S. Ville du Havre while her husband Horatio stayed behind in Chicago on business. The ship was rammed by another vessel and sank within minutes. Anna was pulled from the water unconscious, but all four girls drowned, and she sent Horatio a cable that began ‘Saved alone.’ On his way across the ocean to bring her home, Horatio wrote that he had passed over the spot where the ship went down, but that his girls were safe, folded, the dear lambs. Out of that grief came the hymn we still sing, ‘It Is Well with My Soul.’
