Some of the world’s greatest people have faced the world’s greatest challenges, but have overcome them.
Cripple a man, and you have Sir Walter Scott.
Lock a man in prison, and you have John Bunyan.
Raise a man in abject poverty, and you have Abraham Lincoln.
Subject a man to bitter religious prejudice, and you have Benjamin Disraeli.
Strike a man down with paralysis, and you have Franklin Roosevelt.
Have someone 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 an impoverished Italian family of 18, and you have Enrico Caruso.
Have a man born to parents who survived a Nazi concentration camp, paralyze him from the waist down when he’s four years old, and you have the incomparable violinist Itzhak Perlman.
Call a man a slow learner and mentally challenged, write him off as beyond education, and you have Albert Einstein.
Helen Keller was born blind and deaf, yet she graduated from college with highest honors and impacted the world.
Margaret Thatcher, England’s first and only 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 Meir, 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?’
