At the Battle of Antietam in 1862, Clara Barton arrived near the Cornfield to find surgeons dressing wounds with corn husks because army supplies were far behind. She handed over a wagonload of bandages she had collected herself. With bullets flying overhead, she cradled wounded men, cooked for them and brought them water. As she knelt to give one man a drink, she felt her sleeve quiver. A bullet had passed through it and killed the man she was helping. She kept working until dark, then pulled out lanterns so the surgeons could go on. She later said she never mended that hole in her sleeve. Real service goes where the need is greatest.
In 1901, a seven-year-old Indian girl named Preena escaped from a Hindu temple and ran to Amy Carmichael, a young missionary from Ireland. Preena’s widowed mother had dedicated her to be “married to the gods,” which meant a life of abuse. Her hands had been branded with hot irons after an earlier escape. She had heard Amy speak of a God who loves everyone. Amy checked the story and found the evil was even greater than she imagined. She said, “I must do something about it!” That one rescue launched a 50-year work of rescuing girls and later boys, and the Dohnavur Fellowship still carries it on today. One child’s courage can change a missionary’s whole calling.
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.
One afternoon in April 2023 in Warren, Michigan, a school bus driver called the transportation base to say she felt dizzy and needed to pull over. Seconds later she lost consciousness while the bus was still moving. Seventh grader Dillon Reeves was sitting about five rows back. He threw down his backpack, ran to the front, grabbed the steering wheel and slowly applied the brakes before the bus could veer into oncoming traffic. Then he yelled to his classmates, “Someone call 911. Now!” The superintendent called it an extraordinary act of courage and maturity. You don’t have to be grown to be the one who steps up. God can use whoever is willing to move.
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.
