Thomas Chisholm was born in a log cabin in Kentucky and never had much formal education. He was ordained a Methodist minister in 1903, but ill health cut his ministry short after one brief appointment. He ended up selling insurance in Vineland, New Jersey. No big pulpit, no fame. Yet he kept writing poems, more than 1,200 of them. He sent some to musician William Runyan, who said one poem appealed to him so much that he prayed earnestly over the tune. That poem was “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” Decades later, George Beverly Shea sang it in Britain in 1954 and it became a favorite. An ordinary life can still sing of an extraordinary God.
In the summer of 1964, a geographer named Donald Currey was studying ancient bristlecone pines below Wheeler Peak. He found a tree local mountaineers called Prometheus. Accounts differ on what happened next. Some say his coring tool broke off in the tree. Others say he wanted a full cross section. Either way, with Forest Service permission, the tree was cut down. When they counted the rings, Prometheus had 4,862 of them. It was estimated to be about 4,900 years old, the oldest tree anyone had ever dated. Today its stump is all that’s left. Something that survived nearly five thousand years was lost in an afternoon because nobody realized what they had. Don’t wait until it’s gone to treasure what God put in front of you.
When Fanny Crosby was only six weeks old, a man posing as a doctor treated an illness by putting hot mustard poultices on her eyes, and the treatment left her blind for life. She could have grown up bitter. Instead she became one of the most loved hymn writers in history, writing more than 9,000 hymns, including “Blessed Assurance,” “To God Be the Glory,” and “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior.” One well-meaning preacher told her it was a great pity the Master hadn’t given her sight. She said that if she could have made one request at birth, it would have been to be born blind. Why? “Because when I get to heaven, the first face that shall ever gladden my sight will be that of my Savior.”
In 1939 a London stockbroker named Nicholas Winton worked his day job and then spent his evenings arranging permits, foster homes, and money so that eight trains could carry 669 children, most of them Jewish, out of Prague to safety in Britain before the war closed the borders. He hardly ever talked about it, and for nearly 50 years the story sat in a scrapbook his wife found in their attic. In 1988 the BBC show That’s Life! invited him into its studio audience, and on a later show the host asked, “Does anyone here tonight owe their life to Nicholas Winton?” More than two dozen grown men and women sitting all around him stood up to thank the humble man who had saved them.
Two weeks after an ALS diagnosis forced him out of baseball, Lou Gehrig stood at home plate in Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939, in front of 61,808 fans. He had every reason to talk about his bad break, but instead he spent the speech thanking people: the fans, his teammates, his managers, the groundskeepers, his parents, his wife, and even his mother-in-law. “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth,” he said, closing with the words that he might have been given a bad break, but he had an awful lot to live for. Gehrig died less than two years later, at 37, but that day he showed the whole country that gratitude can stand up tall in the middle of a storm.
