When Charles II took the throne, the freedom to worship outside the Church of England ended. By January 1661, preacher John Bunyan was in the county jail. The hardest part was being separated from his wife and four children. He wrote that it felt like “the pulling the flesh from my bones.” He made shoelaces to help support his family. He could have walked out any time by promising not to preach. He refused, telling the magistrates he would rather stay in prison until moss grew on his eyelids than fail to do what God commanded. He stayed about twelve years. During that time he wrote, and from 1667 to 1672 he likely worked mostly on The Pilgrim’s Progress. God used a prison cell to bless millions.
In the early 1920s, doctors knew diabetes was linked to a missing substance from the pancreas, but every attempt to extract it had failed. Frederick Banting, a young Canadian doctor, read a medical article by Moses Baron about what happens when the pancreatic duct is tied off. It gave him an idea for how to get the substance out before it was destroyed. Determined to test it, he talked it over with several people, and Professor J.J.R. Macleod at the University of Toronto gave him facilities to work. With a medical student named Charles Best as his assistant, Banting began the work that led to the discovery of insulin. Millions of lives followed from one man who read carefully and would not let a good idea go.
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.
Around the 1988 Olympics, sprinter Gail Devers was running slowly and getting sicker. She lost weight, lost hair, had headaches and skin sores, and at one point weighed just 79 pounds. She told her coach she wanted to quit, but he would not let her resign and said they would figure it out. After years of visiting doctors, she learned in 1990 that she had Graves’ disease. The radiation treatment left painful blisters on her feet, and she says doctors came close to amputating them. Two years later, in Barcelona, she won the Olympic 100 meters in a photo finish thought to be the closest ever. A coach who refuses to give up on you can be a picture of the God who never does.
Before Dick Fosbury, high jumpers went over the bar face down using the straddle or the scissors. As a teenager at Medford High in Oregon, Fosbury worked out a different way. He went over backward, head first. People thought it looked strange. A newspaper caption even said “Fosbury flops over bar,” and the name stuck. At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, the crowd was so surprised by his style that they stopped cheering and just watched. The 21-year-old won gold with an Olympic record of 2.24 meters. Four years later, 28 of the 40 jumpers at the Olympics were using his flop. Doing the right thing a new way can look odd at first. Do not be afraid to be faithful even when you look different from everyone else.
