Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Weekday Devotion With Pastor Chris


Every year the United Kingdom’s Royal Humane Society awards the Stanhope Medal for the most courageous and heroic rescue of the previous year.  The award was created in 1873, and named after Chandos Scudamore Stanhope, an officer in the Royal Navy who had died of smallpox while stationed in Malta at just 48 years old.  Twenty years before he had become a national hero for rescuing a drowning seaman.  When he died, his friends raised a large sum of money to perpetuate his memory by honoring similar rescues each year.

     The very first recipient of the Stanhope Medal was a man named Matthew Webb.  Born in 1860, he learned to swim in the River Severn, and at twelve joined the training ship HMS Conway for two years before shifting to the merchant navy.  While serving as second mate on a Cunard Line ship traveling from New York to Liverpool, he attempted to save a man who had fallen overboard by diving into the sea in the middle of the Atlantic.  Sadly, the man was never found, but Webb’s efforts made him a hero of the British press and he was awarded the very first Stanhope Medal.  As it turns out, it wasn’t his first rescue attempt.  Ten years before he had saved his twelve year old brother who had been drowning in the Severn.

     Today, Matthew Webb is remembered not for saving his brother or for earning the first Stanhope Medal.  He is remembered, rather, as the first person to ever swim across the English Channel.  On August 24, 1875, smeared in porpoise oil and accompanied by three escort boats, he dove off the Admiralty Pier in Dover.  Twenty-one hours and forty minutes later he arrived on the other side of the Channel, near Calais.   It is estimated that his zig-zag course (shaped by the currents he had to face) covered nearly 40 miles.  The feat brought him both national and international fame.

     In the years that followed, Webb wrote a book, merchandised his name, and participated in various swimming matches and stunts.  His final stunt some eight years later, however, did not go well.  Attempting to swim through the whirlpool rapids just below Niagara Falls, he drowned.  He was subsequently buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Niagara Falls, New York.

     Today, if you visit Webb’s birthplace of Dawley, Telford, you will find a memorial to him on High Street with the inscription: “Nothing great is easy.”

     I agree with the sentiment.  I’m not so sure, however, about risking one’s life for the sake of fame and fortune, especially when it means leaving behind a wife and two young children as Webb did.  Real greatness, to my mind, isn’t something you seek.  It is something conferred (if conferred at all), while you are going after something altogether different – the by-product and not the goal; the result of faithfulness, or duty, or the pursuit of one’s passion.  Jesus wasn’t seeking greatness when he offered his life upon the cross.  He offered his life, rather, because he loved the Father, and loved all of us.  Yet surely there is no greater person who ever walked this earth. 

“You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.  It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” (Matthew 20:25-28)

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