The Promise That Outlasted Three Generations

In 1943, a sharecropper named Hattie Mae Roberts in Kosciusko, Mississippi, made a quiet promise to God. She couldn't read, owned nothing, and picked cotton six days a week. But every Sunday she walked her granddaughter to Faith United Mississippi Baptist Church and whispered the same prayer: "Lord, use this child for something I'll never live to see."

Hattie Mae died in 1963. She never saw her granddaughter become the most influential broadcaster in American history. Oprah Winfrey has spoken often about how her grandmother's faith planted seeds that took decades to bloom.

God works like that. He is never in a hurry, but He is never late.

When Paul stood in the synagogue at Antioch and traced the long arc from David to Jesus, he was revealing something breathtaking about how the Almighty operates. God called David — a shepherd with dirt under his fingernails and poetry in his heart — and declared him "a man after My own heart." Then God let a thousand years pass. Dynasty after dynasty. Exile and return. Silence between the testaments. And then, from David's line, He brought forth a Savior, exactly as promised.