In 1993, college basketball coach Jim Valvano, who had led North Carolina State to the 1983 national championship, was dying of cancer. At the first ESPYS awards, he received the Arthur Ashe Courage Award. He’d been sick with a fever that day and had to be helped onto the stage, but then he gave the speech of a lifetime. He told everybody to do three things every day: laugh, think, and have your emotions moved to tears. “If you laugh, you think and you cry, that’s a full day.” He announced a cancer research foundation with the motto, “Don’t give up, don’t ever give up.” He ended, “Cancer can take away all my physical abilities. It cannot touch my mind, it cannot touch my heart, and it cannot touch my soul.”
The Hubble Space Telescope launched in April 1990 with huge expectations, and two months later NASA had to admit the images were blurry. The main mirror had been ground to the wrong shape, too flat near its outer edge, with an error ten times larger than allowed. It was an embarrassing mistake. Instead of giving up, engineers designed corrective optics, and in December 1993 astronauts flew up and installed what amounted to a pair of eyeglasses for Hubble. The before and after pictures were stunning. The telescope that started as a punchline went on to give us some of the most beautiful views of the universe ever seen.
When Fanny Crosby was only six weeks old, a man posing as a doctor treated an illness by putting hot mustard poultices on her eyes, and the treatment left her blind for life. She could have grown up bitter. Instead she became one of the most loved hymn writers in history, writing more than 9,000 hymns, including “Blessed Assurance,” “To God Be the Glory,” and “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior.” One well-meaning preacher told her it was a great pity the Master hadn’t given her sight. She said that if she could have made one request at birth, it would have been to be born blind. Why? “Because when I get to heaven, the first face that shall ever gladden my sight will be that of my Savior.”
In 1928, Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming was working in his London lab when he noticed something odd. A mold had accidentally grown on one of his culture plates of staphylococcus bacteria, and around the mold there was a clear circle where the bacteria had died. Plenty of people would have thrown the dish out as spoiled. Fleming got curious instead. He experimented and found that the mold stopped the bacteria even when diluted 800 times. He named the active substance penicillin. It took years and other scientists to turn it into a usable medicine, but in 1945 Fleming shared the Nobel Prize, and penicillin went on to save countless lives.
Thomas Dorsey was a blues piano man who later gave his life to gospel music. One hot August day in 1932 he left his pregnant wife Nettie in Chicago to sing at a revival in St. Louis. After he sang, a messenger handed him a Western Union telegram: his wife had died. Back home he learned Nettie had given birth to a boy, but that night the baby died too. He buried them together in the same casket. Dorsey said he didn’t want to serve God anymore or write gospel songs. A few days later a friend took him to a quiet room with a piano, and as his hands moved over the keys, the words came: “Precious Lord, take my hand.” It became the most famous of his songs.
