"Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us."
— Hebrews 12:1
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Colonel Harland Sanders was sixty-five years old when he began driving across America with a pressure cooker and a fried chicken recipe in his car.
He had retired. The interstate had been built straight through his old restaurant in Corbin, Kentucky, and the business he had built over decades had collapsed. He had a Social Security check of one hundred and five dollars a month and a recipe his customers had loved.
So he got in his car and started driving.
He drove from restaurant to restaurant, offering to cook his chicken in their kitchens. If they liked it, he asked for a nickel for every chicken they sold using his recipe. He slept in his car. He cooked in strangers' kitchens.
He was rejected one thousand and nine times.
One thousand and nine. Read that number slowly. Each rejection a restaurant owner saying no. Each rejection a drive to the next town. Each rejection a night in the car. Each rejection a sixty-five-year-old man with a pressure cooker and a recipe and no other plan.
The one thousand and tenth restaurant said yes.
That yes became Kentucky Fried Chicken.
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I have thought about this story often as I have gotten older.
What strikes me is not the success. The success is what gets remembered. What strikes me is the one thousand and nine.
Most of us would have stopped at twenty. Some of us, at five. Almost none of us, at one thousand. The math of rejection is brutal — every closed door multiplies the weight of the next attempt. By the hundredth no, you are no longer young and hopeful. By the five hundredth, you are exhausted. By the thousandth, you are a man past sixty driving down another two-lane road with a pressure cooker rattling in the back seat.
What kept him driving?
I do not know him, but I know the human heart. I do not believe it was confidence. Confidence does not survive a thousand rejections. I believe it was something quieter — a stubbornness about the one thing he knew he had. The recipe was good. He had tasted it himself. He had watched people eat it and ask for more. The world's noes did not change what he knew about the chicken.
This is the kind of perseverance the Bible keeps describing.
Not the perseverance of the strong. The perseverance of the stubborn-about-the-true-thing.
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If you are reading this and you are past sixty, or past seventy, you may be in a season where the doors have been closing for a while. The careers have wound down. The projects you thought would define you have either succeeded or failed and now sit on a shelf. The world has stopped asking what you can offer.
Hear from Hebrews: you are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. The ones who kept driving when they had every reason to stop. Caleb at eighty-five asking for the mountain. Moses at eighty starting over in Egypt. Sanders at sixty-five driving to the next restaurant.
You are not too old for the thousandth door.
The recipe in your hands — the gift, the calling, the thing you know to be true — is not less real because the world has said no a thousand times.
Keep driving.
The yes may be at the next door, or the next, or the next. The yes may not come at all. But the running, the persevering, the refusal to stop because the world has not yet recognized what you carry — this is what Hebrews calls faith.
Throw off what hinders. Get back in the car.
The thousand-and-tenth door is the only one that matters.
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Prayer
Lord, I have been keeping count of the closed doors.
Today, with Caleb, with Moses, with Sanders, with the great cloud of witnesses, I throw off what hinders and get back in the car.
Show me the thousand-and-tenth door.
And if it does not come — if the rejections continue past one thousand and nine — keep me driving anyway. The recipe is still good. You have given it to me. The running is itself the faith. Amen.
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Written by Dr. Jang in Jeju, Korea. Adapted into English by his son