From Leg Braces to Gold

Wilma Rudolph was born prematurely in 1940, the twentieth of twenty-two children in Clarksville, Tennessee. At four years old, she contracted polio, which left her left leg paralyzed. Doctors told her mother she would never walk without a brace. For years, young Wilma wore a metal leg brace and orthopedic shoes. Her mother drove her ninety miles round trip to Nashville for treatments, and her siblings took turns massaging her weakened leg every single day.

By age twelve, Wilma shed the brace. By sixteen, she was competing in the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, earning a bronze medal in the relay. And in 1960, at the Rome Olympics, Wilma Rudolph became the first American woman to win three gold medals in a single Games — the 100 meters, the 200 meters, and the 4x100 relay.

The girl who was told she would never walk ran faster than any woman on earth.

This is what the Almighty does. He does not look at where we are and declare that is where we must stay. Paul wrote, "If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here" (2 Corinthians 5:17). God specializes in the impossible transformation — taking what is broken, what the world has written off, and making it whole and strong and new.

Whatever brace you are wearing today — whatever limitation the world has spoken over you — know that the Holy One who made you is not finished with you yet.