Thomas Dorsey was a blues piano man who later gave his life to gospel music. One hot August day in 1932 he left his pregnant wife Nettie in Chicago to sing at a revival in St. Louis. After he sang, a messenger handed him a Western Union telegram: his wife had died. Back home he learned Nettie had given birth to a boy, but that night the baby died too. He buried them together in the same casket. Dorsey said he didn’t want to serve God anymore or write gospel songs. A few days later a friend took him to a quiet room with a piano, and as his hands moved over the keys, the words came: “Precious Lord, take my hand.” It became the most famous of his songs.
George Müller lived a wicked life as a young man in Germany before he was converted at about age 20. Later, as a preacher in England, he made a decision: he would never take a salary or ask anyone directly for money. He would tell his needs to God alone. In 1834 there was room for only about 3,600 orphans in all of England. Müller started taking them in at Bristol, and over his lifetime he built five large orphan houses and cared for 10,024 children. He never took out a loan or went into debt, and neither he nor the orphans ever went hungry. When he died in 1898, his own possessions were worth only a few hundred dollars.
In 2010, a rockfall trapped 33 miners about 700 meters underground at the San Jose mine in northern Chile. They were stuck in a space about the size of a small apartment, with almost no food and heat that never dropped below about 90 degrees. The worst day, one miner said, was when a rescue drill came close and missed them, and their hearts sank. One of the men, Jose Henriquez, stepped up as a kind of pastor. He told the others that even if they’d lost everything else, they hadn’t lost prayer. They formed a circle and prayed together twice a day while he shared God’s word. Up top, officials were quietly preparing for bad news, but more than two weeks in, a drill finally broke through. All 33 came out alive after 69 days, and several dropped to their knees to thank God.
