A Book in One Hand, Courage in the Other

On October 9, 2012, a Taliban gunman boarded a school bus in Mingora, Pakistan, and demanded, "Which one of you is Malala?" Then he fired three shots. Fifteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai — who had been blogging for BBC Urdu since age eleven about girls' right to learn — took a bullet to the left side of her head. Airlifted to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, England, she endured multiple surgeries and months of grueling rehabilitation.

What Malala did next stunned the world. Rather than retreat into hiding, she stood before the United Nations on July 12, 2013 — her sixteenth birthday — and declared, "One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world." She returned to school in Birmingham. In 2014, at just seventeen, she became the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate in history.

The Taliban assumed a bullet would silence a girl who loved books. They miscalculated.

Paul writes to Timothy, "For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind" (2 Timothy 1:7). That phrase — a sound mind — speaks to the disciplined, clear-thinking courage that refuses to let terror have the final word. Malala's story reminds every congregation that the pursuit of knowledge is never timid work. When we open a book, mentor a student, or fund a classroom, we participate in the same holy defiance: choosing the sound mind God gave us over the fear the world tries to impose.