While General Eisenhower masterminded the D-Day landings, he himself gave the credit for their success to someone you’ve probably never hear of, Andrew Higgins.
Higgins wasn’t a soldier but a brilliant designer of boats, and it was he who solved the biggest problem facing an amphibious assault – 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.
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