Humpback whales live in every ocean and make one of the longest migrations of any mammal. Some swim 5,000 miles between warm breeding waters and cold feeding grounds. By the time commercial whaling was finally stopped, humpback populations had been crushed, most cut by more than 95 percent. In 1985 an international moratorium on commercial whaling took full effect, and according to NOAA it played a major role in their recovery. Today the species is increasing through much of its range, though four of its 14 population segments are still listed as endangered. The hunting stopped, and life came back. When God calls us to lay down something that harms others, healing often follows faster than we expect.
Walter Scott was an early preacher in the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement. Studying Acts 2:38, he taught that people respond to God by believing, repenting, and being baptized, and that God responds with forgiveness of sins, the gift of the Holy Spirit, and eternal life. He made it simple enough to count on one hand, and generations of Disciples learned it as the five-finger exercise. On November 18, 1827, he preached on Matthew 16:16, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Scott later called that sermon the one that restored the ancient gospel. Over the next three years his preaching on Ohio’s Western Reserve brought more than 3,000 converts. Most had been outside the church entirely. Keep the gospel clear enough to share.
In the early 1920s, doctors knew diabetes was linked to a missing substance from the pancreas, but every attempt to extract it had failed. Frederick Banting, a young Canadian doctor, read a medical article by Moses Baron about what happens when the pancreatic duct is tied off. It gave him an idea for how to get the substance out before it was destroyed. Determined to test it, he talked it over with several people, and Professor J.J.R. Macleod at the University of Toronto gave him facilities to work. With a medical student named Charles Best as his assistant, Banting began the work that led to the discovery of insulin. Millions of lives followed from one man who read carefully and would not let a good idea go.
Around the 1988 Olympics, sprinter Gail Devers was running slowly and getting sicker. She lost weight, lost hair, had headaches and skin sores, and at one point weighed just 79 pounds. She told her coach she wanted to quit, but he would not let her resign and said they would figure it out. After years of visiting doctors, she learned in 1990 that she had Graves’ disease. The radiation treatment left painful blisters on her feet, and she says doctors came close to amputating them. Two years later, in Barcelona, she won the Olympic 100 meters in a photo finish thought to be the closest ever. A coach who refuses to give up on you can be a picture of the God who never does.
At the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, Jim Thorpe, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, won both the pentathlon and the decathlon in dominant fashion. King Gustav V presented the medals and, as the story is famously told, called him the greatest athlete in the world. A few months later Thorpe was stripped of his medals because he had played minor league baseball, which broke the strict amateur rules of the day. In 1983 the IOC gave replica medals to his family but listed him only as a co-winner. Finally, on July 15, 2022, the 110th anniversary of his decathlon win, the IOC recognized him as the sole champion. Justice may take a long time. God sees what is right, and the record will one day be set straight.
