Overcoming adversity.
Chuck Borsellino
For the next couple of minutes let's talk about tragedy, let's pull back the covers on hardship... let's explore the costs and the consequences of adversity... you name the burden: it humbles the proud, it melts the muscular, it softens the stubborn. Adversity is a giant that does its greatest damage on the battlefield of our mind (not our body). It steals our hope, it deflates our dreams... it minimizes our goals. Adversity fights a silent and stubborn battle on the sacred shores of our soul. It's won many a battle and has taken many a prisoner. Some have found an escape... some have remained captive for a lifetime. Adversity plays no favories... it has conquered both prince and pauper, saint and sinner, intellectual and illiterate. Many have fought this giant called adversity... and the truth... while many have conquered it... more have been crushed by it. What's the difference? Prayer, perseverance and a purpose in life that refuses to be swallowed by circumstances.
You know, it's amazing to me what God has done through those who might have been considered "shortchanged" because of a physical or mental disability. Isaac Watts was handicapped with a severe physical deformity yet he became a popular preacher in his day, authored a skillion books of poetry and wrote more than 600 sacred songs. Fanny Crosby, who was accidentally blinded at 6 weeks of age, triumphed over her handicap and composed more than 8,000 hymns. Take a gifted man and cripple him... and you have Sir Walter Scott. Lock him in a prison cell... and you have John Bunyan. Afflict him with asthma as a child... and you have Theodore Roosevelt. Tell him he's stupid because he just failed the 6th grade... and you have Winston Churchill. Tell him he has a mental disorder because he didn't speak until he was 4 and didn't read until he was 7... and you have Albert Einstein. Deny a little girl the ability to see, or speak, or hear... and you have Helen Keller. Afflict a baby boy from Arkansas with cerebral palsy... and you have the mold of a man named David Ring.
So now, let me ask you a question... what's your problem? What's holding you back from fulfilling God's desires... your destiny or your dream? Maybe it's asthma, arthritis or an old athletic injury. Maybe you feel too old, too poor or too exhausted. Can't speak in public you say? What about a man called Moses? Have a "thorn in the flesh" you say? What about an apostle named Paul? Now let me ask you again... what was that problem you were about to mention? I thought so...
Dr. Cunningham
The little country schoolhouse was heated by an old-fashioned, pot-bellied coal stove. A little boy had the job of coming to school early each day to start the fire and warm the room before his teacher and his classmates arrived.
One morning they arrived to find the schoolhouse engulfed in flames. They dragged the unconscious little boy out of the flaming building more dead than alive. He had major burns over the lower half of his body and was taken to a nearby county hospital. From his bed the dreadfully burned, semi-conscious little boy faintly heard the doctor talking to his mother. The doctor told his mother that her son would surely die - which was for the best, really - for the terrible fire had devastated the lower half of his body.
But the brave boy didn't want to die. He made up his mind that he would survive. Somehow, to the amazement of the physician, he did survive. When the mortal danger was past, he again heard the doctor and his mother speaking quietly. The mother was told that since the fire had destroyed so much flesh in the lower part of his body, it would almost be better if he had died, since he was doomed to be a lifetime cripple with no use at all of his lower limbs.
Once more the brave boy made up his mind. He would not be a cripple. He would walk. But
unfortunately from the waist down, he had no motor ability. His thin legs just dangled there, all but lifeless.
Ultimately he was released from the hospital. Every day his mother would massage his little legs, but there was no feeling, no control, nothing. Yet his determination that he would walk was as strong as ever.
When he wasn't in bed, he was confined to a wheelchair. One sunny day his mother wheeled him out into the yard to get some fresh air. This day, instead of sitting there, he threw himself from the chair. He pulled himself across the grass, dragging his legs behind him.
He worked his way to the white picket fence bordering their lot. With great effort, he raised himself up on the fence. Then, stake by stake, he began dragging himself along the fence, resolved that he would walk. He started to do this every day until he wore a smooth path all around the yard beside the fence. There was nothing he wanted more than to develop life in those legs.
Ultimately through his daily massages, his iron persistence and his resolute determination, he did develop the ability to stand up, then to walk haltingly, then to walk by himself - and then - to run. He began to walk to school, then to run to school, to run for the sheer joy of running. Later in college he made the track team.
Still later in Madison Square Garden this young man who was not expected to survive, who would surely never walk, who could never hope to run - this determined young man, Dr. Glenn Cunningham, ran the world's fastest mile!
