Sermon Illustrations
Dr. Ben Carson's Mother
Dr. Ben Carson, world famous surgeon, has performed more than 400 operations a year, mostly brain and spinal surgeries. Besides his faith, his mother is one of the chief reasons he became one of the premier brain surgeons in the United States. Dr. Carson said of his mother, "She was one of 24 children, got married at age 13, found out that her husband was a bigamist, [she only had a] third-grade education, and the thing about my mother is that she never adopted a victim's mentality.Â…She prayed, she asked God to give her wisdom because my brother and I were terrible studentsÂ…."
God heard the prayer of Carson's mother. Today Carson's brother is an engineer and Ben went from being ranked as the worst student in his fifth grade class to being named head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins when he was 33, the youngest in the nation at the time. On the occasion of its 200th anniversity, the Library of Congress named him one of the 89 "Living Legends." In 2001, he was chosen by CNN and Time magazine as one of America's top 20 physicians and scientists.