Five Chairs and a Prayer

In 1904, Mary McLeod Bethune rented a small cottage in Daytona Beach, Florida, and opened a school for Black girls with five students, a dollar and a half in savings, and crates turned upside down for desks. She made ink from elderberries. She stuffed mattresses with Spanish moss gathered from the trees. When families could not afford tuition, she took sweet potatoes instead.

For fifty years, Bethune poured herself into that community — not with grand speeches but with practical, tireless love. She raised funds penny by penny, built dormitories with her own hands, and personally nursed students through illness. By the time she died in 1955, her little cottage school had become Bethune-Cookman College, and thousands of graduates carried the mark of her investment in their lives.

When the widows of Joppa stood weeping before Peter, they held up the tunics and garments Dorcas had sewn for them. They did not quote her theology. They showed the work of her hands. That is the testimony of a life like Bethune's — and like Dorcas's. The proof of genuine discipleship is not found in what we profess but in what we produce. Every stitch, every elderberry inkwell, every act of quiet mercy becomes evidence that the love of Christ has taken root in human hands.