The Girl Who Wasn't Supposed to Walk

As a child growing up in Clarksville, Tennessee, Wilma Rudolph wore a metal brace on her left leg. Born prematurely at just four and a half pounds — the twentieth of twenty-two children — she had survived polio, scarlet fever, and double pneumonia before her twelfth birthday. Doctors told her mother plainly: this girl will never walk normally.

At age twelve, Wilma removed that brace and walked across the floor on her own. Eight years later, at the 1960 Rome Olympics, she became the fastest woman alive, winning three gold medals in a single Games. The Italian press nicknamed her La Gazzella Nera — the Black Gazelle. A child declared beyond repair had become the most celebrated sprinter on earth.

There is a Hebrew word woven through the prophets: shub — to return, to restore, to make whole what was broken. The prophet Joel proclaimed it boldly: "I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten" (Joel 2:25). Those are not the words of a God who patches things up. They are the words of the Almighty, who rebuilds entirely.

Perhaps you came here today wearing a brace of your own — a failure, a fractured relationship, a wound you've carried quietly for years. The Most High does not look at what is broken and walk away. He looks at what is broken and calls it the beginning of a story.