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.
William Wilberforce had spent nine years fighting to end the British slave trade. On March 15, 1796, his bill finally looked like it might pass. But his opponents handed out free tickets to a popular opera premiere that same night. Several lukewarm supporters went to the show, and the bill lost 74 to 70. Wilberforce wrote in his diary that enough were at the opera to have carried it. Crushed and ill, he thought about quitting. Then old John Newton wrote to him, reminding him that though he could not do all the good he wished, some good was done, and that he had not labored in vain. Wilberforce kept going. In 1807 Parliament abolished the slave trade.
Adoniram and Ann Judson were American missionaries in Burma. In 1824, when war broke out with the British, Adoniram was arrested as a suspected spy and thrown into the death prison at Ava. He lay with his feet in three pairs of fetters on the damp ground. Ann pleaded with officials and brought food and clothing to the prisoners. Before their house was searched, she buried his precious manuscript of the Burmese New Testament under the house. Later, afraid it might be stolen or ruined by mold, they sewed it up in the form of a pillow covered with a mat. The Word of God has always been worth protecting, whatever it costs.
In 2003, thirteen-year-old Bethany Hamilton was lying on her surfboard off Hawaii with her left arm dangling in the water. A shark came up and attacked, pulling her back and forth. In two or three seconds her left arm was gone. A friend’s father pulled her to shore and tied a leash around her arm as a tourniquet. Less than a month later she told CNN that her family and her faith helped her stay positive. She was getting her stitches out and planned to paddle out on Thanksgiving Day. She said she wanted to catch the first wave on her own with no one else’s help. Loss doesn’t get the last word when hope is anchored in God.
As the Brooklyn Bridge project got underway in 1869, designer John Roebling died, and his son Washington became chief engineer. Then Washington was struck down by caisson disease, what we now call the bends. It damaged his sight and hearing and left him partly paralyzed. His wife Emily stepped in. She wrote his letters, kept his notebooks, reviewed plans, visited the site and met with contractors, who were stunned by her engineering knowledge. Historian David McCullough said she was literally his eyes, his legs, his good right arm. Washington wrote that he had a strong tower to lean upon, his wife. The day before the bridge opened in May 1883, Emily had the honor of driving the first carriage across it. Faithful partners build great things.
