"George Washington Carver: The Man who Overcame" by Lawrence Elliot (available at the library in Stockbridge, GA)

Every Christian should have an in-depth acquaintance with George Washington Carver, especially those who live in the South. It was Carver who saved the economic hide of the South, a South that had been so long dependent on cotton that the planters had depleted the land to nothing.

Yet it’s Carver the Christian whose life is worth knowing. Even with every disadvantage known to man, Carver knew that God had His hand on him, and at a very young age, he knew God had a pre-arranged destiny for his life.

Poverty? We don’t know the meaning of the word compared to what Carver endured. Trust? Our trust of God pales beside this giant of the faith. The Solomon of his day, people from all over the world wore a path to his door: Theodore Roosevelt had dinner with him; Franklin D. Roosevelt honored him; Albert Einstein corresponded with him; and congressmen listened to him. (When testifying before a congressional subcommittee, the committee asked Carver where he learned so many uses for the peanut. Carver showed them where—"From the book of Genesis," he said, and called their attention to chapter and verse.

We hear nothing of Carver today, although scores of schools are named in his honor. About the only thing we know of him is to connect his name with the peanut, but that’s only one part of a man who was an award-winning painter and the person who invented a new shade of blue, a shade known only to the ancient Egyptians.

But it was Carver’s faith that stands out as he teaches not only the agricultural sciences but also voluntary Bible classes attended by over 300 students at his beloved Tuskegee College. Caring little or nothing for material things, he wore the same suit for forty years. When one man bought him a winter coat for $125, that was more money than Carver had spent on clothes during his entire lifetime.

Encourage your teens to read George Washington Carver: The Man who Overcame or some other biography of Carver. There aren’t many books out there about him. In an angry I’ve-got-my-rights-age, the world doesn’t consider him a hero, but had he been alive before Hebrews 11 was written, surely a place would have been found for Carver’s name in that great chapter. Encourage your children to read it? No, not only them. We can all learn from such a life.

Dr. Michael D. Halsey