Sterling Terrell

recovering economist

The Story Of Eric Liddell

The Story Of Eric Liddell

If you don’t know the story of Eric Liddell, check it out ASAP.

I think it is a fantastic case of knowing exactly who you are and exactly what you want out of this short life.

Of course, his story was popularized in the classic film, Chariots Of Fire.

Watch, watch.

In the northern Chinese city then known as Tientsin (now Tianjin), a Scottish missionary mulls over the ever-spreading gossip: people say the occupying army of Japan will soon round up all foreign nationals in the city and place them in an internment camp. He realizes that he has already missed his chance to return to the West, to his wife and daughters, then living in Toronto. This Scotsman had been born in Tientsin in 1902 and had returned there to serve after being educated in England and Scotland, and after having won a gold medal at the 1924 Paris Olympics in the 400-meter run and a bronze in the 200 meters. His name is Eric Liddell, and in March he will be taken to the Weihsien internment camp, and will die there, of a brain tumor, in February 1945.

-Alan Jacobs, The Year Of Our Lord 1943 (Amazon)

Something Other Than

Something Other Than

Chasing something other than what we were meant for is an invitation to great sadness.

But I think this principle applies to more than one area.

If you were destined for teaching special education, a life in a physics lab is not going to sit well with you over the long run, for example.

Likewise, a heart for studying computer science is not going to find joy in studying human resources.

And volunteers who love college students are not likely to flourish when made to engage with elementary students in the same way.

Of course, this goes for life itself too.

If we were made for a purpose that we resist, it’s our loss, I suppose.

When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy. Those Divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover, in fact marshal us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted.

-C.S. Lewis, The Problem Of Pain (Amazon)

Sterling Terrell