Diana Nyad will not become the first woman to swim from Cuba to Florida without the aid of a shark cage.
On Tuesday, August 9, about halfway through the projected sixty-hour slog, her handlers yanked her from the water, a victim of asthma, a bum shoulder and battering waves. The sixty-two year old endurance swimmer says she won’t attempt it again.
What impresses me is not that Nyad failed, but that she tried. In fact, I respect her training more than her performance. She assembled a team of twenty-two specialists to join her in the task. Six weather experts gauged wind patterns in an effort to find calm seas. A navigator bounced satellite signals off his laptop to keep her on course. Two kayakers flanked her to zap incoming sharks with electronic light sabers and four scuba divers waited to battle the beasts if the shock treatment failed. An onboard physician monitored hydration and nutrition.
“That’s the part that really interests me about Diana,” Steve Munatones, himself a champion open-water swimmer, told the New York Times. “It’s not just the swimming part. There are people who can swim this. But they don’t have the organizational, political and passionate oratorical skills she has.”
Bottom line: Solo success requires an ensemble.
As Paul wraps up his letter to the Romans he underscores the importance of teamwork for the long haul. His subject is plural: “brethren;” his predicate is singular: “sacrifice.” In other words, many bodies make up one offering laid on the altar for Christ. The only real reference to individualism comes in a warning that no one person think too highly of her own contribution! Then the apostle starts naming the members of the team: prophets, servants, teachers, exhorters, givers, leaders and grinning mercy-merchants. The list runs the spectrum of “organizational, political and passionate oratorical skills.” It doesn’t matter who, at a given moment, is in the water and who is on board the boat; what counts is that we work together and endure to the end of our race.
Collect
God the Spirit, You distribute gifts of grace, not according to what each of us desires but according to what all of us need. Grant that our many and several gifts may work to the single goal of glorifying Our Lord Jesus Christ together with the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God now and forever, Amen.
Benediction
May God make of your many bodies
A single sacrifice.
May God make of your many minds
A single understanding.
May God make of your many gifts
A single offering.
That we who are many may be one,
And that all may be welcome in the One God who is
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
Amen
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