Everybody was watching Samuel Langley. He had backing from the Smithsonian and the War Department, and the press followed his every move. Meanwhile two bicycle makers from Ohio, Wilbur and Orville Wright, worked in relative obscurity. They made more than a thousand glides off Big Kill Devil Hill, learning to actually fly before they ever added an engine. When they couldn’t find a light enough engine, they built their own. On December 17, 1903, Orville kept their machine in the air for about 120 feet. It doesn’t sound like much. Later that day Wilbur flew 852 feet in 59 seconds. Then they sent their dad a matter-of-fact telegram. Quiet, patient faithfulness in small things often goes further than all the attention in the world.
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.
In the summer of 1964, a geographer named Donald Currey was studying ancient bristlecone pines below Wheeler Peak. He found a tree local mountaineers called Prometheus. Accounts differ on what happened next. Some say his coring tool broke off in the tree. Others say he wanted a full cross section. Either way, with Forest Service permission, the tree was cut down. When they counted the rings, Prometheus had 4,862 of them. It was estimated to be about 4,900 years old, the oldest tree anyone had ever dated. Today its stump is all that’s left. Something that survived nearly five thousand years was lost in an afternoon because nobody realized what they had. Don’t wait until it’s gone to treasure what God put in front of you.
William Carey was an English shoemaker’s apprentice who became convinced that the church should be taking the gospel to the whole world. In 1792 he helped organize a missionary society and preached a sermon with the call, “Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God!” Within a year he and his family were on a ship to India. The early years were miserable. Money ran short and the work was hard. He labored seven years before baptizing his first convert, Krishna Pal, in December 1800. He kept going. Over the next 28 years he and his helpers translated the whole Bible into six of India’s major languages and parts of it into more than 200 others. He spent 41 years in India without a furlough.
In 1979 a teenager named Jadav Payeng started planting trees on barren land on Majuli, an island in the Brahmaputra River in Assam, India. He just kept planting, year after year, one seedling at a time. It took close to 30 years, but the barren land became a lush forest of about 550 hectares, more than 1,300 acres. Today it shelters birds, deer, and even elephants and tigers. In 2010 he was honored as the Forest Man of India. He gives credit to the birds, cows, deer, wind, water, and elephants that helped spread the seeds, but it started with one young man and a lot of patient work.
