Wednesday: From Invalid to World Champion
WEEK 22
WEDNESDAY
FROM INVALID TO WORLD CHAMPION
2 Peter 1:5-8
This power of comeback and quick recovery is seen in this amazing passage: “They stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city, supposing he was dead. When the disciples surrounded him, he got up and entered the city again. The following day he left with Barnabas to Derbe. . . . Then they returned to Lystra . . . where they strengthened the disciples” (Acts 14:19-22). Note “supposing he was dead. He got up and entered the city again”—apparently under his own steam and not on a stretcher or in an ambulance, as with us. The vitality of the man! And more, “The following day he left with Barnabas to Derbe”—again under his own steam, though he must have been terribly bruised and battered from the stoning and the dragging. And note again “they returned to Lystra . . . where they strengthened the disciples.” Paul didn’t get the disciples to strengthen him; he strengthened them! From a victim of storm to a victor of strengthening—well, that is victory.
And it can happen today. I sat at lunch with a man who had won five world records and was once called the fastest human, Glenn Cunningham. Yet at five years of age he was so severely burned that for a year he was attended by a doctor in his own home. He overheard people talking in the next room: “Too bad Glenn is going to be an invalid for life.” He determined he wouldn’t be; he saw a medal and determined he would have it. After exercising muscles that had apparently gone, he ran his first race in blue jeans and tennis shoes—and won—but left for home half-frightened before he got the medal! That was the beginning. The boy who was to be an invalid won five world records and, at forty-five, told me he felt that with training he could equal those world records. But he was so busy going to high schools and colleges giving lectures on fitness—speaking especially against liquor and tobacco, that he didn’t have time to train. He was training youth effectively, out of experience.
Whatever happens to us, justice or injustice, pleasure or pain, can be mastered and made to contribute to the ends for which we live. Everything is possibility.
O Christ, I see in you everything unfolding into possibility. You are Possibility. Help me to face everything today with the expectation of possibility everywhere. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: “In him who strengthens me, I am able for anything” (Phil 4:13 MNT).