When pioneer farmers reached the Illinois prairie, their cast-iron plows couldn’t handle that thick, sticky black soil. It kept clinging to the plow instead of turning over. In 1837, a blacksmith named John Deere in Grand Detour, Illinois, took steel from an old, broken sawmill blade, bent it over a log, and made the cutting part of a new plow. Its moldboard was polished smooth so the soil slid right off instead of sticking. It turned that hard ground and polished itself clean as it went. The plow worked so well that by 1846 Deere was selling almost a thousand a year, and by 1856 more than 13,000. That plow helped open the rich prairies to farming. Hard ground doesn’t get fruitful by wishing. Somebody has to break it up, and sometimes God does it with a broken blade.
Wangari Maathai was born in Nyeri, Kenya, in 1940 and became the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate. In 1976, while serving with the National Council of Women of Kenya, she introduced a simple idea: plant trees with ordinary people. That idea grew into the Green Belt Movement, a grassroots effort that helped women plant more than 20 million trees on their farms and on school and church grounds. It spread to other African countries too, as people she trained started their own tree-planting efforts. In 2004 she received the Nobel Peace Prize. It didn’t start with a grand plan to change a continent. It started with a seedling and a willing pair of hands, and then another, and another.
Martin Rinckart was a pastor and musician in the German city of Eilenburg during the Thirty Years’ War, which ran from 1618 to 1648. War, famine, and plague filled the town with refugees. As one of the last ministers left alive in the city, Rinckart stretched his own resources to care for people, and at the height of the plague he was conducting nearly fifty funerals a day. Out of that season came the hymn we still sing every Thanksgiving: “Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices.” In its 1663 printing it was titled “A little table prayer,” which suggests it was meant to be sung as grace before a meal. Picture that. A worn-out preacher, scraps on the table, funerals all day, and he sits down and sings about countless gifts of love. Gratitude doesn’t wait for good times. It’s how faith talks in hard ones.
On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. She was not simply a tired seamstress who happened to say no. She had served as secretary of the local NAACP since 1943 and had disobeyed bus segregation rules before. Her arrest sparked a bus boycott, and about 17,000 Black residents stopped riding. The boycott lasted until the buses were desegregated 13 months later. Her quiet courage cost her. She lost her job and received death threats. Still, one woman who refused to move helped move a whole nation. Courage is often quiet, and it is usually prepared long before the moment comes.
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.
