Ignoring The Barriers Of The Past

IGNORING THE BARRIERS OF THE PAST

Every four years, the world’s attention turns to the summer Olympic games. For a few days, men and women from around the globe gather to compete against the best. Amazing records are broken and new ones are set at these games.

The Four-Minute-Mile:

Just a few decades ago, track-and-field experts proudly declared that no runner could break the four-minute-mile barrier. It was said that a human being couldn’t run that distance that fast. "Experts" conducted all sorts of profound studies to show it was impossible to beat the four-minute barrier. And for years, they were right. Nobody ever ran a mile in less than four minutes.

Roger Bannister:

But one day a young man came along who didn’t believe the experts’ opinions. He didn’t dwell on the impossibilities. He refused to let all those negative words form a stronghold in his mind. He began to train, believing he was going to break that record. Sure enough, he went out one day and broke the four-minute-mile barrier. He did what the experts said couldn’t be done. His name was Roger Bannister, and he made sports history.

Other Runners:

Now, here is what is so interesting about the Roger Bannister story... Within a month, the Australian runner John Landy had broken Bannister’s record, but Bannister had the satisfaction of beating Landy at that summer’s British Empire Games in Vancouver. In a race billed as "The Mile of the Century," both runners beat the four minute time, but Bannister came in first at 3:58.8 to Landy’s 3:59.6.....Within ten years after Roger Bannister broke that record, 336 other runners had broken the four-minute-mile record as well!

Think about that. For hundreds of years, as far back as statisticians kept track-and-field records, nobody ran a mile in less than four minutes; then, within a decade, more than three hundred people from various geographic locations were able to do it.

What happened? Simple. The barrier to running a four-minute mile was in the athletes’ minds. For all those years, runners believed what the experts were saying. They were convinced that it was impossible to run a mile in less than four minutes.

ROBER BANNISTER IGNORED THE BARRIERS …

You Too Can Break The Barriers Of The Past !!!

(From a sermon by Herman Abrahams, Breaking the Barriers of the Past, 10/19/2009)