Up and Doing

Longfellow wrote:

Let us, then, be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait.

We all admire achievers, especially the ones who pursue daring goals once considered impossible. History’s great achievers paved the way for others to follow.

In 1875, Captain Matthew Webb was the first man to swim across the English Channel without any artificial aids. Eight years after his accomplishment, he died while attempting to swim through the Whirlpool Rapids below Niagara Falls.

Robert E. Peary was the first to reach the North Pole (in 1909).

In 1922, 87-year-old Rebecca Latimer Felton of Georgia became the first woman to serve in the United States Senate. (Appointed to fill a vacancy, she served for 24 hours.)

Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean (in 1928).

Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League baseball by playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.

In 1953, a beekeeper from New Zealand named Edmund Hillary became the first to reach the top of Mount Everest. Hillary later wrote of the conquest, “Awe, wonder, humility, pride, exaltation—these surely ought to be the confused emotions of the first men to stand on the highest peak on earth, after so many others had failed. But my dominant reactions were relief and surprise. Relief because the long grind was over and the unattainable had been attained. And surprise, because it had happened to me, old Ed Hillary, the beekeeper.”

Roger Bannister was the first to run a mile in less than four minutes (in 1954).

On July 21, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on the moon.

Compared to these great achievers, the rest of us look mediocre. And yet, for these heroes to achieve their goals, someone else had to be “up and doing” as well, serving in a support role. When Peary traveled to the North Pole, a supporting entourage of five other men braved the harsh climate with him. Hillary made it to the peak of Mount Everest accompanied by a Nepalese Sherpa guide named Tenzing Norgay. Jackie Robinson followed in the footsteps of outstanding athletes who played in relative obscurity in baseball’s Negro leagues. Neil Armstrong made it to the moon with the assistance of NASA engineers and technicians who designed everything from the spacesuit he wore to the powdered orange juice he drank.

All of us rely on others. Even “self-made men” actually were made by the Maker. Maybe that’s why in the Bible *achieve *doesn’t appear nearly as often as believe.

The highest achiever of all is Jesus. “He is the image of the invisible God” and “the head of the body, the church” (Colossians 1:15, 18). To him belongs “the name that is above every name” (Philippians 2:9). He is “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being,” the perfect “once for all” sacrifice for sin (Hebrews 1:3, 10:10). He is “the First and the Last,” the “Living One” who was dead but now is “alive forever and ever” (Revelation 1:17, 18). He was “up and doing” before we ever did a thing, and he has achieved what we could never do for ourselves.

History may not notice, but the greatest thing we can be “up and doing” is simply to trust and obey the Lord.