In January 1998, six-year-old Ryan Hreljac heard his grade one teacher, Mrs. Prest, explain that people were getting sick and even dying because they had no clean water. Some walked for hours just to get dirty water. Ryan only had to walk ten steps to the drinking fountain. He went home and begged his parents to help. They let him do extra chores, and he worked for four months to earn $70, the amount he thought would build a well. Then he learned a well in Uganda would cost $2,000. He did not quit. He spoke to anyone who would listen, and his first well was built at Angolo Primary School in Uganda. That little project became Ryan’s Well Foundation.
In September 1944, while she was pregnant, Danish rider Lis Hartel developed polio. For a while she could not walk at all. She learned to walk again with braces, but she stayed partially paralyzed below her knees. Still, she kept riding. In 1952 women were allowed to compete in Olympic dressage for the first time, and Hartel went to Helsinki. She had to be helped on and off her horse, yet she won the silver medal behind Sweden’s Henri Saint Cyr. At the victory ceremony, the gold medalist helped her climb up onto the podium. Four years later the same two riders finished first and second again. Strength is wonderful, but so is the champion who reaches down and lifts a rival up beside him.
David Livingstone spent his childhood working 14 hours a day in a cotton mill. He trained to be a medical missionary to China, but the Opium War shut that door. Then he heard Robert Moffat describe “the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary had been before,” and he went to Africa. Things were hard. His only convert in those early years went back to his old ways. Livingstone was not an easy man, and he fought with many fellow workers. Still, he kept pressing into the interior to open what he called God’s Highway. Years later, worn out and lost in swamps, he died in a mud hut, kneeling beside his cot in prayer. He ended his race the way he ran it.
On Española Island in the Galapagos, the giant tortoise population had dropped to just 15 animals. A breeding program begun in the 1960s brought together two other males and 12 females with a tortoise named Diego, who had spent decades at a zoo. The program worked so well that Española now has a stable population of around 2,300 tortoises. Diego alone fathered at least 800 offspring. On June 15, 2020, when he was over 100 years old, Diego and 14 other tortoises were carried back to Española and released into the wild. One faithful old tortoise helped bring a whole species back from the edge. Faithfulness over a long life can bless generations.
