In the 1840s, a young doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis started counting deaths in two maternity wards at Vienna General Hospital. Women in the ward run by doctors and medical students died at nearly five times the rate of the ward run by midwives. Then a colleague cut his finger during an autopsy and died of the same fever. Semmelweis put it together: the doctors were coming straight from autopsies to deliveries. He ordered his staff to clean their hands and instruments with a chlorine solution, and childbed fever dropped dramatically. You’d think everybody would cheer. They didn’t. Doctors didn’t like being told they were the problem, and Semmelweis eventually lost his job. He had the truth, but nobody wanted to hear it.
Marshall Keeble was a Black preacher among the churches of Christ who spent 55 years as a full-time evangelist, much of it in the segregated South. Estimates of how many people he baptized run from about 30,000 to as many as 40,000, and he is credited with planting hundreds of congregations. As president of the Nashville Christian Institute, he took young preachers along on his travels, including a student named Fred Gray, who later became a famous civil rights attorney. Gray said he learned how to preach and so much more from those trips. Keeble navigated prejudice with steadiness and toughness, and kept pointing people to Jesus until his death in 1968. Faithfulness over a lifetime is its own kind of miracle.
Every fall, monarch butterflies in eastern North America head south, some of them flying up to 3,000 miles to the mountain oyamel forests of central Mexico. The Forest Service says the monarch is the only butterfly known to make a two-way migration like the birds. Here is the amazing part: the butterflies making that trip have never been to Mexico before. It takes three or four generations to make the trip back north, so not one of them has seen the place they are flying to. Yet they find it, tens of thousands clustering on a single tree. Scientists are still studying how they navigate. The God who guides a butterfly that weighs less than a gram can surely guide you home.
As a girl in West Virginia, Katherine Johnson counted everything: the steps to the road, the steps up to church, the dishes she washed. Her father was so determined she would reach her potential that he moved the family 120 miles so she could keep going to school. She finished high school at 14 and college at 18. Later, as a NASA mathematician, her calculations helped send Americans into space. Before astronaut John Glenn orbited Earth, he wanted her to check the numbers. He said, “If she says they’re good, then I am ready to go.” In 2015 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Quiet faithfulness in the details builds the kind of trust others can launch on.
