For he looked for a city …whose builder and maker is God. Hebrews 11:10
As a child, more than anything, Florence Chadwick wanted to be a great swimmer. At the age of six she persuaded her parents to enter her in a 50-yard race. They did, and she came in last. She practiced every day for an entire year, then entered the same contest. Again, she lost, but this time by not so great a margin. At the age of 11, she entered an endurance competition and completed a 6-mile course—a remarkable feat for her age. As a teenager she competed for a spot on the Olympic team and failed to make the team.
Eventually she married and for a while became interested in other things, but in the back of her mind she kept thinking, “I wonder if endurance isn’t my forte?” Twelve years after she failed to make the Olympic team, she successfully swam the gruesome English Channel, breaking Gertrude Ederle’s 24-year-old record. At last, she had hit her stride. Eventually she swam the same churning stretch of water both ways—the first woman to accomplish this feat.
As a girl, Florence had often looked towards Catalina Island from the San Diego area where she grew up and thought about swimming the 26-mile, shark-infested waters. On July 4, 1951, she made the attempt. The distance wasn’t the problem. It was the temperature of the frigid waters. Then on that day a dense fog covered the entire coast. After fifteen hours in the water, she became very, very tired. Her mother, in a support vessel, urged her on, but finally she gave up and her weary, limp body was hauled into the boat. What she didn’t realize at the time was that it was less than a half-a-mile, not even a kilometer, to the shore.
The next day at a news conference she said, “Look, I’m not excusing myself. But if I could have seen the land, I might have made it.” Not long afterwards, she made the same attempt. Again, a misty veil obscured the coastline making visibility impossible. This time, when she was tempted to give up and quit, she reminded herself of how close she was the previous time, but this time she made it, breaking the record by more than two hours.
I couldn’t help thinking of Abraham, who saw by faith a city whose builder and maker was God. He was sure it was there, though in the flesh he couldn’t see it. Then there are the comforting words written by a one-time cynic, Malcolm Muggeridge, who came to faith in Christ late in life. In his book Christ and the Media, he reflected on heaven, saying, “As the old do, I often wake up in the night, half out of my body, so that I can see between the sheets the battered carcass I shall soon be leaving for good, and in the distance a glow in the sky, the lights of Augustine’s City of God.”
When you’re tempted to give up, to quit, to lose heart, think of Florence Chadwick’s words: “If I could have seen land, I might have made it.” There are some things that are very, very real though you have not seen them—too far away, obscured by distance, fog, veiled by poor eyesight. You’ve seen pictures of them or noticed a dot on the map telling you where they are. Perhaps you’ve even talked with a pilgrim who’s been there, or a weary traveler who has returned to tell you how it is there.
Friend, that’s the way it is with heaven, to you who believe in God’s Son. Christ has been there, and the fact is the closer you get to it, the larger it looms before you. Don’t lose heart, and don’t let the dark waters obscure its light, or the fog keep you from seeing it. It’s there—take it by faith.
Resource Reading: Revelation 21:1-5
