By God’s grace you can overcome

Some of the world’s greatest people faced the world’s greatest challenges, but they overcame them. Cripple a man, and you have Sir Walter Scott. Lock him in prison, and you have John Bunyan. Raise him in abject poverty, and you have Abraham Lincoln. Subject him to bitter religious prejudice, and you have Benjamin Disraeli. Strike him down with paralysis, and you have Franklin Roosevelt. Have them born black in a society filled with racial discrimination, and you have Booker T. Washington, Harriet Tubman, Marian Anderson and George Washington Carver. Make a man the first child to survive in a poor Italian family of eighteen, and you have Enrico Caruso. Have him born to parents who survived a Nazi concentration camp, paralyze him from the waist down when he’s aged four, and you have the incomparable violinist, Itzhak Perlman. Call a man a slow learner, mentally challenged, and write him off as uneducable, and you have Albert Einstein. Helen Keller was born blind and deaf, yet she graduated college with highest honours and impacted the world. Margaret Thatcher, England’s first woman prime minister, lived upstairs over her father’s grocery store. For a while her childhood home had no running water and no indoor plumbing. Golda Meier, Israel’s first and only woman prime minister, was a divorced grandmother from Milwaukee. What do these people teach us? That success doesn’t depend on our circumstances but on overcoming our circumstances! And with God on our side, we can do it! Paul, one of the world’s great overcomers, wrote, “If God be for us, who can be against us?”