The Olympian Who Ran Toward an Unseen Country

In 1924, Eric Liddell stood on the Olympic podium in Paris with a gold medal around his neck. The whole of Scotland celebrated him. Newspapers called him the fastest man in the British Empire. Every door of comfort and celebrity swung wide open before him.

He walked away from all of it.

Within a year, Liddell boarded a ship for northern China to serve as a missionary teacher in Tianjin. Friends thought it was a waste. A gold medalist grading schoolwork in a foreign province — what kind of trade was that? But Liddell had heard a call that no stadium crowd could drown out. He spent nearly twenty years teaching, preaching, and caring for the poorest families in rural China, even as war closed in around him.

In 1943, Japanese forces interned him at the Weihsien camp in Shandong province. He never left. Liddell died there in February 1945, five months before liberation, from a brain tumor — still teaching children, still organizing games in the yard, still pointing others toward the God he trusted with everything.

He never saw Scotland again. He never reclaimed his fame. But like Abraham, he was looking for something beyond what the visible world could offer — a city whose architect and builder is the Almighty. Hebrews reminds us that faith is not blind. It simply sees what others cannot yet see, and it walks toward that unseen country with steady feet.