Houston, We’ve Had a Problem

In April 1970, Apollo 13 was headed for the moon when an oxygen tank blew. Jack Swigert saw the warning light and said, “Houston, we’ve had a problem here.” The landing was off. Now the only goal was getting three men home alive. The crew moved into the lunar module and used it like a lifeboat. Then carbon dioxide started building up. There were plenty of filter canisters, but the square ones from the command module didn’t fit the round openings in the lunar module. So the team on the ground figured out how to make them fit using plastic bags, cardboard, and tape, all stuff already on board. It worked. Apollo 13 splashed down safely in the Pacific. Sometimes you don’t need new resources. You need to use what God already put in your hands.

Water at the Well-House

Helen Keller lost her sight and hearing as a small child, and for years she lived in what she later called a still, dark world. In March 1887 a teacher named Anne Sullivan came to Alabama. She spelled words into Helen’s hand over and over, but Helen kept mixing up “mug” and “water.” One day she got so frustrated she smashed her new doll on the floor. Sullivan didn’t quit. She walked Helen out to the well-house, put one of her hands under the spout, and spelled w-a-t-e-r into the other. Suddenly it clicked. Helen wrote that the living word awakened her soul and gave it light, hope, and joy. She left that well-house eager to learn. Never underestimate what patient love can unlock in somebody.

Frederick Douglass Traded Bread for Lessons

As an enslaved boy in Baltimore, Frederick Douglass had a mistress who started teaching him the alphabet. Then her husband found out and shut it down. He said it was unlawful and unsafe to teach a slave to read, because reading would make him unfit to be a slave. Douglass heard every word, and it hit him like a revelation. If his master feared reading that much, reading had to be the pathway from slavery to freedom. So he found new teachers: the little white boys he met in the street. He carried bread with him on errands and gave it to the hungry kids, and they gave him what he called the more valuable bread of knowledge. What was meant to hold him down became the very thing that lifted him up.

The Milkmaids and the End of Smallpox

Smallpox was one of the deadliest diseases in human history. It’s believed to have been around for at least 3,000 years and it killed millions. Then an English doctor named Edward Jenner noticed something everyone else had missed. Milkmaids who’d already caught cowpox didn’t catch smallpox. In 1796 he showed that a similar inoculation could protect other people, and the first successful vaccine was born. It took a long time, but in 1967 the World Health Organization launched an all-out push to wipe the disease out. The last known natural case was in Somalia in 1977, and in 1980 smallpox was declared eradicated. One careful observation, followed by years of faithful teamwork, ended an ancient killer.

The Survivor Tree

A month after the September 11 attacks, workers at Ground Zero found a badly damaged Callery pear tree in the rubble. Its roots were snapped and its branches were burned and broken. Most folks would’ve hauled it off with the rest of the debris. Instead, it was pulled out and handed over to the New York City parks department. They nursed it back to health, and in 2010 it was brought back and planted at the 9/11 Memorial. New, smooth limbs grew out of the old gnarled stumps, and you can still see the line between its past and its present. Every spring it blooms with thousands of little white flowers. God specializes in bringing new life out of what everyone else counted as rubble.