In 1938 Karoly Takacs was a sergeant in the Hungarian Army and a member of his country’s world champion pistol team. During an army exercise a grenade exploded in his right hand, his shooting hand, and shattered it. While recovering in the hospital he decided to teach himself to shoot with his left hand. Within a year he had won the national title. In 1948, at age 38, he made the Olympics in London. The world record holder, Carlos Enrique Diaz Saenz Valiente of Argentina, was surprised to see him and asked why he was there. Takacs said, “I’m here to learn.” He won gold and broke the record. On the podium the Argentine told him, “You have learned enough.” Takacs defended his title four years later.
NASA’s Opportunity rover landed on Mars on January 24, 2004. It was planned for a 90-day mission. At one point it got stuck in sand, and controllers spent six weeks freeing it a few inches at a time. In 2007 dust storms cut its power so low that all science was suspended, but after about six weeks it was back in action. It became the first human enterprise to travel more than a marathon on another world, and it kept going for over 28 miles. Opportunity outlived its expected life by 60 times. Its last contact came on June 10, 2018, after a planet-wide dust storm. A plan for 90 days became more than 14 years. Never underestimate what faithful, steady effort can do.
On the morning of July 6, 1885, a nine-year-old boy named Joseph Meister was brought to Louis Pasteur’s laboratory in Paris. A rabid dog had bitten him fourteen times. In those days rabies was a death sentence. Pasteur had been working on a vaccine but had never tried it on a human being. Over the next ten days the boy received thirteen injections. Joseph Meister never developed the disease, and he became the first person vaccinated against rabies. Soon patients with animal bites poured in from France and other countries, and that flood of need led to the founding of the Institut Pasteur. A frightened boy received something he could never earn, and it gave him life. That is a picture of grace.
The Arctic tern is a small seabird with a big reputation. Audubon calls it a long-distance champion. It breeds in the far north, on coasts and tundra up to the northernmost land on earth. When the season changes, it heads south, and some Arctic terns may migrate farther than any other bird, flying all the way from the high Arctic to the Antarctic. Its travels take it to every ocean and near every continent. It spends most of its life on the move over open sea. Nobody hands it a map. It simply follows the path its Creator built into it, season after season. We are on a long journey too, and the God who guides the birds will guide us home.
