DAY 1

The Woman Who Tore down the Wall

History books will never tell you that Nellie Clyde Wilson ended the Cold War. But history often overlooks its most important people.

Nellie was a little wisp of a woman, born the youngest of seven kids in a small town on the road to nowhere. Despite her strict Presbyterian upbringing, she fell head over heels in love with a dashing Irish Catholic named Jack.

It wasn't long after the wedding that Jack began to show his true colors. Brought up in a family of hard drinkers, Jack had a taste for whiskey. Jobs were hard to come by, and it didn't help that Jack's drunkenness got him repeatedly fired. Their family was forced to move at least ten times in fourteen years. Nellie eked out a meager living by taking in sewing and laundry, and somehow managed to make the meals stretch for Jack and their two boys. Most months she barely scraped together the rent money. Yet she never lost her sense of humor or optimism. Her youngest boy often recalled that she was the most positive woman in his life.

Mostly, her boys observed the way she loved Jesus. They went with her to the jailhouse, bringing hot food to prisoners. They watched her subsist on crackers because she had taken her meal next door to a sick neighbor. When Jack complained about her tithing to the church, Nellie good-naturedly replied that God would make their ninety percent twice as big if he got his tenth.

Nellie was a bit player in small-town America. You might never have known who she was if it hadn't been for her sons. They flourished under her unbounded optimism and grew strong observing her heroic faith. She steeled them with discipline and lavished them with love. Every night she read her boys stories about good and evil. Her youngest son's favorite was about a knight in shining armor who conquered an evil empire. From Nellie, this little boy learned how to dream big and overcome impossible odds. She nurtured his love for acting and told him that he could change the world. Most of all, she taught him to love God.

The world remembers this wisp of a woman by her married name: Nellie (Nelle) Clyde Wilson Reagan. The son she nicknamed Dutch grew up to live out his mother's bedtime story, becoming the knight in shining armor who triumphed over an evil empire. President Ronald Reagan often said that his mother was the most influential person in his life.

Could it be that this diminutive washerwoman from a small town in Illinois was the one who tore down the Berlin Wall and set millions free from Communist tyranny because of a dream that she instilled in her son?

As you ponder your own life story, you might take heart from something that Nellie wrote in her well-worn Bible:

You can be too big for God to use, but you can never be too small.

* * *

He gives grace generously. As the Scriptures say, "God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble."

JAMES 4:6

DAY 2

A Mouse That Roared

He hated the name that his missionary mother gave him at birth. As a runt fighting for a spot on the rugby fields, he figured that Henry was a sissy's name. But it wasn't as bad as the nickname his classmates gave him: the Mouse.

After college, the Mouse returned to China to teach chemistry at a boys' school. When bloody civil war broke out, he went where the fighting was fiercest. His wife begged him not to go, but he was determined to go to those in greatest need. When the Japanese later invaded China, the Mouse sent his family to Canada but refused to leave his mission. It wasn't long before he landed in a concentration camp. He was a quiet hero in that barbed-wire mission field before a brain tumor threatened his life. Winston Churchill pleaded with the Japanese to release him. But when the prisoner exchange took place, the Mouse gave up his spot to a pregnant woman. Not long after, he died in that Japanese camp.

Why was this prisoner so important that the British prime minister personally intervened for his release? Perhaps Churchill recalled a day twenty years earlier when the Mouse roared on the center stage of Olympic history. In 1924 Henry was known by his middle name, Eric. Sportswriters called him the Flying Scotsman. You might have watched his inspiring story in the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire. At the Paris Olympics he won a gold medal. But a number of Olympians did that in 1924.

The Mouse made headlines for another reason: he refused to run when he discovered that the qualifying heats for his races were set for Sunday. Raised a strict Presbyterian, he believed that it was a sin to compete in athletics on the Sabbath. So the Mouse decided that standing on principle trumped running for gold. When the British Olympic committee pleaded with him to run for king and country, he refused to budge. His stand seems quaintly old-fashioned in an age where sports dominate our Sundays.

The Mouse went to church while others competed. He lost two gold medals but gained the respect of the world for his unwavering integrity. Later that week, he did win a gold medal, setting a world record that stood for a decade. Could it be that this principled stand in Paris produced a hero in China twenty years later? Maybe it was his character as much as his athletic prowess that led to a 2002 poll naming him Scotland's most popular sports figure of all time.

Mice can roar like lions when there's conviction in their bellies. A single mouse standing its ground has been known to stampede bull elephants. You might not agree with Henry Eric Liddell's views on the Sabbath, but in an age of compromise his story is worth remembering. There are some principles that far outweigh gold medals. Certainly this much is true:

If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything.

* * *

Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

MATTHEW 7:13-14, NIV

DAY 3

The Triumph of Bubbles

When Belle Silverman was born with bubbles in her mouth, her immigrant mother gave her a nickname that lasted a lifetime. Yet life was anything but bubbly for the girl called Bubbles. Brooklyn neighbors exclaimed that her golden curls and precocious talent made her a Jewish Shirley Temple. Those compliments became a curse when her obsessive stage mom stole Bubbles's childhood by dragging her to endless auditions for roles in radio, movies, and vaudeville. Mrs. Silverman was sure that her Shirley Temple look-alike was their ticket out of poverty. Repeated rejections at those auditions traumatized little Bubbles. So did the look of disappointment in her mother's eyes.

When she was sixteen, her voice teacher said that she was tailor made for the opera. But nothing ever came easy for Bubbles. She spent ten frustrating years on the road trying to make it in second-tier operas. The New York City Opera turned her down seven times before they accepted her. When Bubbles finally snagged a starring role, critics panned her performances as uneven. Leading opera houses refused to let her appear on their stages. It was only after she went to Europe and won over the toughest opera fans in the world that critics begrudgingly recognized her magnificent voice.

Even when she...