The Teacher Who Wouldn't Walk Away

In 2018, Katie Blomquist, a first-grade teacher in North Charleston, South Carolina, noticed her students had no bicycles. Not a single one. Most had never learned to ride. She launched a campaign to give every child at her Title I school a bike, and the mockery came swift. Colleagues called it naive. A local commenter wrote that she was wasting her time on kids who would just sell them. One parent told her to mind her own business.

Katie set her face forward and kept going. She raised enough money for 650 bikes. Then she did it again the next year. And the next. Going on seven years now, her organization has given away over 4,000 bicycles to children across the Lowcountry. Every insult she absorbed without retaliating. Every dismissal she met with quiet, determined action.

Isaiah's Suffering Servant knows this posture. The Lord God opened his ear each morning, and he did not turn back. He offered his back to those who struck him and his cheeks to those who pulled out his beard. He set his face like flint — not out of stubbornness, but out of trust. "The Sovereign Lord helps me," he declared. "Who will condemn me?"

When God places a calling on your heart, opposition is not a stop sign. It is confirmation that you are close enough to the darkness for the light to matter. The One who vindicates you is near.