Embrace the Impossible – by William G. Johnsson

Chapter 1
The Boy in the Biggin

“With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”
—Jesus Christ (Matthew 19:26)

     On October 27, 1728, a boy was born in Marten in Yorkshire, England. He would grow up to rewrite the map of the world.
     Nothing could have seemed less likely at the boy’s birth. He was born in a mud-and-thatch hovel known in those parts as a biggin. It had but two small rooms with a dirt floor, and farm animals wandered in and out.
     Life expectancy was low. Four siblings perished before the age of 5: Mary, Mary (pathetically named for the deceased sister, but also doomed to die young), Jane, and William. An older brother, John, died at age 23.
     The boy’s father worked as a day laborer, making the prospects bleak indeed for his surviving son. The boy would not go to school. In fact, public education did not exist. His would be a life of hard-scrabble poverty, always focused on earning enough to put bread on the table. He could not expect to travel or to improve his lot in life. His would be like those of generations before him—narrow, confined, chained by circumstances beyond his making or control.
     A day’s walk in radius—this would be the extent of his journeys. Like his father, he would follow the well-trod loop between home, field, and church. And when the end came, he would join his parents and siblings in the crowded family grave plot in the churchyard.
     That this boy would burst the chains of family and upbringing and become one of the greatest adventurers the world has seen—who could have predicted it? That his three epic voyages into realms unknown—into the one-third of the earth’s surface that lay unexplored; home, it was said, to strange sea creatures and fabulous new lands—would open the world to the modern era of travel, who would be so bold as to give words to the idea?
     Impossible.
      Yet the boy in the biggin would sail 200,000 miles in a small wooden ship—as far as the moon is from earth. He would sail further and further south, seeking the fabled continent of terra australis that from ancient times had been speculated to exist as a balancing weight to the land mass of Europe. Onward and further would he press until he crossed 70 degrees of latitude, and only 70 miles from Antarctica, endured cold that turned the ship’s sails to sheets of lead and the ropes to iron cables. Then, having exploded the myth of the great south continent, he turned north, sailing further and still further in search of a passage across the top of the world. Ever onward he journeyed, into cold and mist and treacherous Alaskan waters that even today test the courage of ships’ captains and the mettle of their navigational instruments, onward until he crossed 70 degrees north.
     Could this child, born without hope or prospect of education, pen a million words in his ships’ journal during the seven years of his incredible voyages?
      Impossible.
      Could he acquire such mathematical skills that the charts he mapped of new lands were so accurate that they still would be used two centuries after his death?
      Utterly impossible.
      Could the boy in the biggin, born and raised on the lowest rung of England’s social ladder, who married a woman likewise of low standing—daughter of a dockside tavern keeper—rise to membership in the Royal Society, reserved for the country’s intellectual elite?
      Nonsense. Only in dreams and novels can fantasies like these be given a hearing.
     Yet James Cook, explorer extraordinaire, made the dreams come true, turned fiction into reality in the story of his life, which is every bit as extraordinary as the story of his voyages.
     Reaching the 71st degree south of latitude, in the grip of howling Antarctic gales, Cook wrote in his journal: “Ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has gone before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go.”
     James Cook embraced the impossible.
     Cook did not die in his native land; his body did not join the crowded family plot in the Marten churchyard. His end came in place and manner about as far from the sodden Yorkshire biggin as geography allows or the imagination can stretch. James Cook was speared and clubbed to death by natives of the Hawaiian islands.
     Which he discovered.
      Long before James Cook was born in the Yorkshire biggin another bold adventurer wrote, “It has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on someone else’s foundation” (Rom. 15:20). The apostle Paul, explorer extraordinaire for the Lord Jesus Christ, embraced the impossible.
     The original apostles, all of whom were Jews, focused their missionary efforts on fellow Jews or Gentiles who had been attracted to Judaism. But the risen Lord had commanded that the good news should go to the whole world (Matt. 28:18-20; Acts 1:8), and He chose the unlikeliest person to initiate the global mission. Putting His hand on Saul of Tarsus, strict Pharisee and persecutor of Christians, the Lord commissioned him: “Go; I will send you far away to the Gentiles” (Acts 22:21).
     From a human perspective, the task given Paul was impossible. How could the Roman Empire, proud of its might and civilization, satisfied with its pantheon of gods, be led to embrace a new religion? And such a new religion! No heroic figure here, no clever teacher, but a crucified carpenter, whom His followers alleged to have risen from the dead.
     The new faith had no legal standing. It attracted, not the wise and the powerful, but the poor and the lowly, slaves and servants. “Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong,” Paul wrote to the believers in Corinth (1 Cor. 1: 26, 27).
     And the impossible became reality. Points of light began to glow began to glow in city after city; in synagogues and homes; and, at last, even in Caesar’s own palace.
     The message of the crucified Carpenter who rose from the dead was unstoppable.
     God loves that word impossible. “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” we read in the Old Testament (Gen. 18:14). And in the New, Jesus says, “What is impossible with men is possible with God” (Luke 18:27), and “Everything is possible for him who believes” (Mark 9:23).
     The Bible is a book of heroes. Ordinary people do extraordinary things as they trust God and He empowers them.
      Moses, raised in Pharaoh’s palace, turns his back on Egyptian royalty and leads a slave rabble to freedom.
      David, still a young man wet behind the ears, takes on a giant with five smooth stones and a slingshot.
      Esther, beautiful queen of the Persians, puts her crown and her life on the line to help rescue the people of her birth.
     Daniel, revered elder statesman, prays undaunted with window open and emerges unscathed from the den of lions.
      Before ordinary men and women barriers fail and fortresses crumble. The weak become strong; fainted-hearted act like heroes. They perform amazing feats—feats undreamed of—because, touched by God, they embrace the impossible.
      And why? Because, before they ever attempted the impossible, they laid hold on the Power that motivated the apostle Paul. This is an idea so way out, so far beyond the range of human experience, that most others never entertain it. This is the certainty that God is and that He can be known personally, that He is infinite in love and goodness, that He loves us with a passion stronger than death, and that—in spite of our unworthiness—He regards us as His sons and daughters.
     This is grace.
      To live in grace is to embrace the impossible.
      More and more, I love the word impossible. I don’t want to flee from it, don’t want to dismiss it. I want to live in it. I want to embrace it.
      Embracing the impossible. It’s the story of the Bible. It’s the story of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. And it’s my story.