George Washington Carver and the Laboratory of Devotion

George Washington Carver was born into slavery in Missouri around 1864, his infant body literally valued at three hundred dollars — the price Moses Carver paid a neighbor to retrieve him after raiders kidnapped him and his mother. He never saw her again.

Yet when Carver found faith, something shifted in how he understood his own flesh and bone. He did not see a body that had once been owned by men. He saw a body now owned by the Almighty. Each morning before dawn, Carver walked into his laboratory at Tuskegee Institute and prayed the same prayer: "Lord, what do You want me to do today with what You have given me?"

His hands — hands that had once been another man's property — became instruments of discovery. From the humble peanut alone, he developed over three hundred products. He refused to patent most of them, insisting that God owned the knowledge and he was merely the steward of it.

Paul told the Corinthians, "You are not your own; you were bought at a price." Carver understood this not as a return to bondage but as the deepest liberation he had ever known. When your body belongs to the Living God rather than to appetite, ambition, or another person's ledger book, every ordinary act — every experiment, every step, every breath — becomes an act of worship. That is what it means to glorify God in your body.