When a Coach Could Barely Stand

On March 4, 1993, college basketball coach Jim Valvano stood at the podium of the first ESPY Awards. Cancer had ravaged his body. He needed help walking to the stage. The man who once sprinted across the court after his NC State Wolfpack stunned the world in the 1983 NCAA Championship could barely stand.

But what he said that night has outlived every game he ever coached.

"Don't give up. Don't ever give up."

Valvano told the audience that a full day means laughing, thinking, and being moved to tears. He announced the V Foundation for cancer research, a mission that would carry on long after he was gone. Eight weeks later, he died. But his words and that foundation have since raised hundreds of millions of dollars for research.

Here was a man with every reason to despair, choosing to plant seeds of hope he would never see harvested.

The apostle Paul wrote from a Roman prison, "We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair" (2 Corinthians 4:8). Paul understood what Valvano understood: hope is not the absence of suffering. Hope is the refusal to let suffering have the last word.

Some of you are standing on shaking legs today. The diagnosis came. The marriage crumbled. The phone call changed everything. But the God who holds your future is not finished writing your story. Don't give up. Don't ever give up. Because the One who began a good work in you will carry it to completion.