The name Andrew Higgins probably won’t mean anything to you, but if you live in Western Europe you owe your freedom to him. Speaking in 1964 General Eisenhower said of him, “He’s the man who won the war for us.”
Higgins wasn’t a soldier but a brilliant designer of boats, and it was he who solved the biggest problem facing an amphibious assault against an enemy in fixed, defensive positions – how to get troops and equipment onto the beaches fast enough to overwhelm the enemy and establish a bridgehead strong enough to resist a counterattack. A maverick outsider the Navy was initially uninterested in his ideas, but he persevered and his genius won through. By the end of the war some 20,000 of the landing craft he designed had carried troops ashore in campaigns across the world, and crucially onto the beaches of Normandy.
Jesus was another maverick, resisted by the authorities of his day, who similarly solved a great problem facing humanity – how to bridge the divide between a loving God and a people separated from Him by sin. Dismissed and ridiculed by those who thought they knew best, He too persevered and His divine genius won for the world a freedom that we are still enjoying 2,000 years on.