Bessie Coleman grew up in Texas and later worked as a manicurist in Chicago. When her brother came home from World War I talking about women flying airplanes in France, she decided the sky would be her arena. She applied to almost every flying school in America and was rejected because of her race and gender. So she took advice from newspaper publisher Robert Abbott, learned French, took a better paying job, and sailed for France in November 1920. She completed a ten-month course in a fragile, dangerous era of flight and in 1921 earned an international pilot’s license. When one door slams, look for the one God may be opening somewhere else.
Every fall, monarch butterflies in eastern North America head south, some of them flying up to 3,000 miles to the mountain oyamel forests of central Mexico. The Forest Service says the monarch is the only butterfly known to make a two-way migration like the birds. Here is the amazing part: the butterflies making that trip have never been to Mexico before. It takes three or four generations to make the trip back north, so not one of them has seen the place they are flying to. Yet they find it, tens of thousands clustering on a single tree. Scientists are still studying how they navigate. The God who guides a butterfly that weighs less than a gram can surely guide you home.
In the early 1900s two dams went up on the Elwha River in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. They made electricity, but they also blocked salmon from the upper river for about a century. In 1992 Congress passed a law to restore the river. On September 17, 2011, crews began the largest dam removal in U.S. history. The Elwha Dam was gone in about six months, and the Glines Canyon Dam came down in 2014. Today the Elwha flows freely from the mountains to the sea. Some of us have walls built long ago that still block life from flowing. God specializes in taking down what was never meant to stay.
William Wilberforce had spent nine years fighting to end the British slave trade. On March 15, 1796, his bill finally looked like it might pass. But his opponents handed out free tickets to a popular opera premiere that same night. Several lukewarm supporters went to the show, and the bill lost 74 to 70. Wilberforce wrote in his diary that enough were at the opera to have carried it. Crushed and ill, he thought about quitting. Then old John Newton wrote to him, reminding him that though he could not do all the good he wished, some good was done, and that he had not labored in vain. Wilberforce kept going. In 1807 Parliament abolished the slave trade.
