Two Good Legs

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They showed a map on TV the other night that over her lifetime, U.S. swimmer Katie Ledecky has nearly swum the circumference of the earth. She may as well have swum to Paris for the Olympics, I thought. But I wondered if all her training had felt that way—if, with each stroke, she felt herself crossing the wide Atlantic until it washed into Celtic Sea, then navigating the English Channel and the Black Sea and the Bering fraught with ice, and finally paddling North America’s rivers clear down to its swamps. I wonder if she felt like Magellan, a circumnavigator. Probably, she just felt the nearness of the concrete pool walls as she turned one 50 meters, then another, then another.

The last time the Olympics were held in Paris was 100 years ago in 1924, when a Scotsman named Eric won gold in the 400-meter dash. He was bony with a dimple chin and people who watched him run called it “ungainly”—the way he clawed with his arms and threw his head back. But he was fast, fast enough for gold.

What most folks remember about Eric Liddell is that he refused to run on the Lord’s Day, but that’s only because he’d long stood with both feet on the conviction to keep the Sabbath holy. It was the same with running. As with any gold-chested Olympian, Eric didn’t just show up and give it a spin. He’d been running since boarding school back in Scotland, playing rugby, training, competing, winning, losing, and this is how victory in the Christian life operates. You do not wake up one morning with a conviction strong enough to face the world. You might have to swim the earth first to get there, or, in Eric’s case, run the meters.

That kind of two-legged faithfulness will take you places, and not always to the podium. After the 1924 Olympics, it took Eric back to China, where he’d been born as a missionary’s kid. He never ran another Olympic race, but he did organize basketball and soccer games for the boys in a war camp. Japan had invaded China, banishing thousands of families of foreign descent to the Weihsien Japanese internment camp. Prisoner children who knew him would later write about “Uncle Eric”—how he played chess with them, built model boats, or organized square dances. He led Bible studies, visited the sick, and once gave a boy a pair of his running shoes to keep his feet warm in winter, which to him, was just as worthy a cause as carrying him to gold.[i]

All of this reminds me of a line Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote to his fiancée from prison:

“I fear that Christians who venture to stand on earth on only one leg will stand in heaven on only one leg too.”[ii]

Eric ran on two good legs from West to East, over the rocky crests of the Highlands, under the yellow Paris sun, to the cold reaches of an occupied China, and even then, his race wasn’t finished. He simply handed his running sneakers over to another lad and ran straight from this world into the next. Eric died in the camp just months before the prisoners were liberated.

Lewis said that “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.”[iii]

I’d like to live in this world on two good legs, to garden with two good hands, to pick up children in two good arms, to behold this wide, beautiful earth with the two good eyes God gave me until I’m beholding him in the next.

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Photo credit: https://www.scottishathletics.org.uk/about/history/arnolds-archive/olympic-dreams-on-hold/eric-liddell-in-his-gold-medal-winning-400m-final-at-the-paris-olympics/
[i] Lidell information and history taken from: https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/resources/eric-liddellmuscular-disciple-and-olympic-champion/
[ii] Metaxas, Eric. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. (Thomas Nelson, 2010: Nashville, TN), 456
[iii] Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity. (HarperCollins, 1952: New York, NY), 134