Eight Seconds on the Clock of Eternity

On March 4, 1993, Jim Valvano could barely walk to the podium at Madison Square Garden. The former NC State basketball coach, diagnosed with metastatic bone cancer less than a year earlier, needed his friend Dick Vitale to help him to the stage. He was there to receive the inaugural Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the ESPY Awards, and everyone in the room knew he was dying.

But Valvano did not talk about dying. He talked about living. He spoke of laughing, thinking, and being moved to tears — every single day. "Cancer can touch my body," he told the audience, "but it cannot touch my mind, it cannot touch my heart, and it cannot touch my soul." Then he announced the founding of The V Foundation for Cancer Research, declaring the words that would outlive him: "Don't give up. Don't ever give up."

Less than two months later, on April 28, 1993, Valvano was gone. He was forty-seven years old. But the foundation he launched that night has since raised hundreds of millions of dollars for cancer research.

James writes, "Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance" (James 1:2-4). Valvano understood something that Scripture teaches — suffering does not have the final word. When perseverance finishes its work, what remains is not bitterness but a legacy of wholeness. The trial could ravage his body, but it could not define his soul. That is what it looks like when perseverance completes its work in a human life.