Courageous World Changers: 50 True Stories of Daring Women of God

Courageous World Changers is a fun, engaging and lively read. The profiles of Godly women span the centuries from the 1300s to bold women living today. The stories also cover a broad range of talents and accomplishments, featuring women with lots of guts but no higher education like Ida Lewis to those with scientific degrees like astrophysicist, Jennifer Wiseman. Born in 1842, Ida Lewis grew up in a Rhode Island Lighthouse and became a strong swimmer. She was a teenager when she began pulling drowning men from the stormy waters. When one man saw his rescuer, he moaned, “It’s only a girl,” but by that time Ida had already saved more than a dozen men. She was dubbed “America’s Bravest Women” and honored by President Ulysses Grant. She made her last brave rescue at the age of sixty-three. When asked how she had found the courage over all those years, she answered, “I don’t know. I ain’t particularly strong. The Lord Almighty gives me the strength when I need it, that’s all.” Jennifer Wiseman is a senior astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The comet she discovered in 1987 is named Comet 114P/Wiseman-Skiff. Today she supervises the Hubble Space Telescope mission, working with hundreds of other scientists studying regions of the galaxy where stars formed. She has written essays about the relationship between Christian faith and astronomy. “It’s glorious actually,” she says, “when you think about the fact that the atoms in our bodies were literally forged in stars. As a person of faith myself, I think of stars as God’s factories.” This inspirational and educational book has heart, and I recommend it for all ages.