In 2003, thirteen-year-old Bethany Hamilton was lying on her surfboard off Hawaii with her left arm dangling in the water. A shark came up and attacked, pulling her back and forth. In two or three seconds her left arm was gone. A friend’s father pulled her to shore and tied a leash around her arm as a tourniquet. Less than a month later she told CNN that her family and her faith helped her stay positive. She was getting her stitches out and planned to paddle out on Thanksgiving Day. She said she wanted to catch the first wave on her own with no one else’s help. Loss doesn’t get the last word when hope is anchored in God.
One afternoon in April 2023 in Warren, Michigan, a school bus driver called the transportation base to say she felt dizzy and needed to pull over. Seconds later she lost consciousness while the bus was still moving. Seventh grader Dillon Reeves was sitting about five rows back. He threw down his backpack, ran to the front, grabbed the steering wheel and slowly applied the brakes before the bus could veer into oncoming traffic. Then he yelled to his classmates, “Someone call 911. Now!” The superintendent called it an extraordinary act of courage and maturity. You don’t have to be grown to be the one who steps up. God can use whoever is willing to move.
At the 1988 Winter Olympics, speedskater Dan Jansen learned just five hours before his 500-meter race that his sister Jane had died of leukemia. He skated anyway and fell. Four days later he fell again in the 1,000. In 1992 he came up short again. In 1994 he slipped in the 500 and finished eighth, and he admitted, “Maybe it’s not meant to be.” But he vowed not to quit. In his final Olympic race, the 1,000 meters, he won gold in a world record time. Then he took a victory lap carrying his baby daughter, whose name was Jane. Disappointment is not the end of the story for those who keep going.
When Malala Yousafzai was eleven, she started writing an anonymous blog for the BBC’s Urdu site. Under the heading “I am afraid,” she wrote about her nightmares of being too scared to go to school because of the Taliban in her Swat Valley. She kept speaking up anyway. On October 9, 2012, two Taliban gunmen stopped her school bus, asked for her by name, and shot her. She was fifteen. She was flown to Peshawar, then to intensive care in Birmingham, England. By March 2013 she was back in school. On her sixteenth birthday she spoke at the United Nations. At seventeen she became the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s deciding fear doesn’t get the final say.
When Pete Gray was six, he was hitching a ride on the running board of a produce truck. The driver stopped suddenly, Gray fell, and his right arm got caught in the wheel spokes. Doctors had to amputate above the elbow. Most folks would figure baseball was out. Gray figured out a way. He stripped nearly all the padding out of his glove, wore it on his fingertips, and learned to catch the ball, tuck the glove away, and throw in one quick motion. In 1944 he hit .333 for Memphis and stole 68 bases. In 1945 he made it to the major leagues with the St. Louis Browns. After the season he visited military hospitals and spent time with wounded veterans and amputees. What he lost became the very thing God used to encourage others.
