The Art of the Long Count

In 1947, Jackie Robinson stepped onto Ebbets Field as the first Black man to play Major League Baseball in the modern era. Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers executive who signed him, had made Robinson promise something extraordinary before that first game: "I need a man with the courage not to fight back."

For two full seasons, Robinson endured death threats, racial slurs from opposing dugouts, pitchers throwing at his head, and base runners deliberately spiking his legs. Teammates initially refused to stand near him. Hotels turned him away on road trips. And through it all, Robinson kept his promise. He let his bat and his glove do his talking.

It was not weakness. Robinson had been a fierce competitor at UCLA and a court-martialed Army officer who refused to move to the back of a military bus. He knew how to fight. But he understood that Rickey was right — the cause required a different kind of strength. The patience to absorb injustice without retaliation would open doors that fists never could.

James 1:4 tells us, "Let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing." Robinson's patience was not passive. It was deliberate, costly, and purpose-driven — and it changed a nation.

The patience God asks of us is the same kind. Not the absence of strength, but the presence of something stronger: trust that the Almighty is working even when the crowd is against you.