At the 1988 Winter Olympics, speedskater Dan Jansen learned just five hours before his 500-meter race that his sister Jane had died of leukemia. He skated anyway and fell. Four days later he fell again in the 1,000. In 1992 he came up short again. In 1994 he slipped in the 500 and finished eighth, and he admitted, “Maybe it’s not meant to be.” But he vowed not to quit. In his final Olympic race, the 1,000 meters, he won gold in a world record time. Then he took a victory lap carrying his baby daughter, whose name was Jane. Disappointment is not the end of the story for those who keep going.
Marie Sklodowska was born in Warsaw in 1867, the daughter of a schoolteacher. She married Pierre Curie, and together they took up the study of radioactivity. Their early work was done under hard conditions. The lab setup was poor, and both had to do a lot of teaching just to make a living. Still, they pressed on and isolated two new elements, polonium, named for her home country, and radium. In 1903 they shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. Then in 1906, Pierre was killed. Marie took his place as professor at the Sorbonne, the first woman ever to hold that post. During World War I she personally worked to use radium to ease suffering. Grief didn’t stop her. She kept doing the work God put in front of her.
When Malala Yousafzai was eleven, she started writing an anonymous blog for the BBC’s Urdu site. Under the heading “I am afraid,” she wrote about her nightmares of being too scared to go to school because of the Taliban in her Swat Valley. She kept speaking up anyway. On October 9, 2012, two Taliban gunmen stopped her school bus, asked for her by name, and shot her. She was fifteen. She was flown to Peshawar, then to intensive care in Birmingham, England. By March 2013 she was back in school. On her sixteenth birthday she spoke at the United Nations. At seventeen she became the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s deciding fear doesn’t get the final say.
Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers didn’t just want Jackie Robinson for his talent. He wanted him for his character. Rickey knew the man who broke baseball’s color line would face mental and physical abuse, and he needed someone strong enough to take it without fighting back. On April 15, 1947, Robinson played first base for Brooklyn in his major league debut. He faced teammates and crowds who didn’t want him there, plus threats against himself and his family. He handled it with honor and grace. At the end of that first season, he was named Rookie of the Year. Holding back when you could swing isn’t weakness. It takes more strength than most people will ever know.
When Pete Gray was six, he was hitching a ride on the running board of a produce truck. The driver stopped suddenly, Gray fell, and his right arm got caught in the wheel spokes. Doctors had to amputate above the elbow. Most folks would figure baseball was out. Gray figured out a way. He stripped nearly all the padding out of his glove, wore it on his fingertips, and learned to catch the ball, tuck the glove away, and throw in one quick motion. In 1944 he hit .333 for Memphis and stole 68 bases. In 1945 he made it to the major leagues with the St. Louis Browns. After the season he visited military hospitals and spent time with wounded veterans and amputees. What he lost became the very thing God used to encourage others.
