On the California coast on the morning of July 4, 1952 a fog was rolling in. Twenty-one miles to the west, on Catalina Island, a thirty-four-year-old woman waded into the water and began swimming toward California, determined to be the first woman to ever swim the twenty-one-mile strait. Her name was Florence Chadwick, and she had already been the first woman to swim the English Channel in both directions.

The water was numbing cold that morning, and the fog was now so thick that Chadwick could hardly see the boats in her own party—there to scare away the sharks. As the hours ticked off, she swam on. Fatigue had never been a serious problem; it was only the bone-chilling cold of the water that was threatening. More than fifteen hours later, numbed with the cold, the swimmer asked to be taken out. She couldn’t go on any longer. Her mother and her trainer, in a boat alongside her, urged Chadwick to go on, as they were getting close to shore. Yet all she could see was dense fog. A few minutes later, the swimmer was taken out of the water, and later, realizing that she had been within a half-mile of the shore, she blurted out, “I’m not excusing myself, but if I could have seen the shore, I might have made it.”

Florence Chadwick had been licked, not by the cold or even by the fatigue, but by the fog! The fog had obscured her goal; it had blinded her reason and her eyes. As Christians, we must be careful not to allow ourselves to be blinded by other matters, so that we are prevented from reaching our goals.

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Note: This story is true but two months later, she tried again. The same thick fog set in, but she succeeded in reaching Catalina. She said that she kept a mental image of the shoreline in her mind while she swam. She later swam the Catalina channel on two additional occasions.