Kurt Warner went undrafted out of Northern Iowa. The Green Bay Packers brought him to camp and cut him. So he took a job at a Hy-Vee grocery store in Cedar Falls, stocking shelves for $5.50 an hour, sweeping floors and bagging groceries. He didn’t give up on football. He played in the Arena League and in NFL Europe, and in 1998 the St. Louis Rams signed him. When starter Trent Green hurt his knee before the 1999 season, Warner got his shot. He was named league MVP that year, then threw for a Super Bowl record 414 yards in a 23-16 win over the Titans. Your stocking-shelves season is not the end of your story. Keep working faithfully where you are.
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.
Polycarp was an old man, the bishop of Smyrna, and tradition says he had been taught by the apostle John. Sometime in the second century, Roman authorities came to arrest him. He could have run, but he said, “The will of God be done.” When the officers arrived, he ordered food and drink set out for them and asked for an hour to pray. He prayed for two hours. In the stadium, the proconsul urged him to swear by Caesar, curse Christ, and go free. Polycarp answered, “Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He never did me any injury: how then can I blaspheme my King and my Saviour?” He was burned at the stake.
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.
