Reclaimed for a Racehorse, Destined for Glory

In 1864, Confederate raiders kidnapped an infant slave named George from a Missouri farm. His mother vanished forever. Moses Carver, the farmer who legally owned the child, sent a neighbor to recover the baby, trading his finest racehorse for the return of one sickly orphan. Against all odds, the neighbor rode back with the boy bundled in his arms.

Moses and Susan Carver then did something remarkable. After emancipation, they raised George as their own son. They gave him their name. They taught him to read. They opened the door to an education that would carry him from a dirt-floor cabin to Iowa State College and eventually to Tuskegee Institute, where George Washington Carver would revolutionize agriculture and feed a nation.

Carver himself understood exactly where his story began. "God made the peanut," he once said. "I just discovered what He had in it." He rose before dawn each morning to walk the woods in prayer, convinced that every breakthrough in his laboratory had been prepared long before he arrived at the workbench.

Paul writes that God "chose us in Him before the foundation of the world" and "predestined us for adoption" according to the purpose of His will. Before George Washington Carver drew his first breath, before the raiders came, before the racehorse was traded, a purpose had already been written. God does not improvise with His children. He reclaims them, names them, and sets before them an inheritance prepared from eternity.