Chuck Feeney co-founded Duty Free Shoppers in 1960 and became a billionaire. Then he did something almost nobody does. He set up the Atlantic Philanthropies in 1982 and two years later transferred all his business assets into it, and for years he gave the money away in secret. Forbes called him the James Bond of philanthropy. Over four decades he gave away more than $8 billion to education, health, and other causes, including nearly $1 billion to Cornell, the school he attended on the G.I. Bill. He lived simply, and in 2012 he estimated he’d set aside about $2 million for his and his wife’s retirement. In 2020 the foundation closed its doors because it had given everything away. He died in 2023 at 92. He liked to say, “It’s much more fun to give while you are alive than to give when you are dead.”
In January 1925, diphtheria broke out in Nome, Alaska, and the town needed antitoxin fast. Planes could not fly in the winter conditions, so dog sled teams formed a relay to carry the serum 674 miles from Nenana to Nome. Mushers and dogs pushed through temperatures as low as 85 degrees below zero. They made the run in 127 and a half hours without breaking a single vial. Balto led the final team into Nome and got the statue and the fame. But a twelve-year-old dog named Togo and his musher ran 261 miles, the longest and most dangerous stretch of the trip. Balto’s team ran 55. Faithful work does not always get the credit. God sees it anyway.
Early managers at Yellowstone National Park saw wolves as nothing but destructive predators. Between 1914 and 1926, at least 136 wolves were killed in the park, and by the 1940s wolf packs were nearly gone. A careful survey in the 1970s found no evidence of a wolf population there at all. Over time people came to understand how the whole ecosystem fit together. After years of study and a record number of public comments, 31 gray wolves from western Canada were brought to Yellowstone in 1995 and 1996. What had been driven out was invited back. Some things we push out of our lives, like the hard parts of obedience, turn out to be part of how God keeps us healthy.
Twice a week for more than 30 years, Albert Lexie rose before dawn and rode buses for an hour and a half from Monessen to Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. There he pushed his purple cart through the halls and shined the shoes of doctors, executives, and staff for two to five dollars a pair. From 1982 to 2013 he quietly gave his tips to the hospital’s Free Care Fund, which helps families who cannot afford their children’s care. By the time he retired, his gifts had added up to $202,000. He called the patients Albert’s kids. He died in 2018 at 76. Small, faithful gifts given over many years can add up to something extraordinary.
Mary Anning grew up poor in Lyme Regis on the English coast. Her father, a cabinetmaker, taught her to hunt and clean fossils on the beach, and when he died in 1810 the family sold her finds to pay debts. She had little schooling, but she taught herself geology and anatomy. In 1811 her brother found a strange skull, and in 1812 Mary dug out its five-meter skeleton. Scientists later named it Ichthyosaurus. In 1823 she found the first complete Plesiosaurus, and the famous scientist Georges Cuvier at first disputed it as a fake. Male scientists often bought her fossils and left her name out of their papers. She died in 1847, still short of money. God sees the hidden worker even when others take the credit.
