The Bridge They Crossed Twice

On March 7, 1965, six hundred marchers set out from Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Alabama, heading east toward Montgomery to demand the right to vote. John Lewis and Hosea Williams led the column. When they crested the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they saw what waited on the other side — a wall of Alabama state troopers in gas masks, sheriff's deputies on horseback. The troopers charged. Tear gas rolled across the pavement. Billy clubs cracked against skulls. John Lewis's skull was fractured. Amelia Boynton Robinson was beaten unconscious. Television cameras captured it all, and the nation watched in horror what became known as Bloody Sunday.

But they came back. Two weeks later, on March 21, some three thousand marchers crossed that same bridge again — the same concrete, the same steel, the same Alabama sky. This time they kept walking. For four days they marched fifty-four miles, and by the time they reached the Alabama State Capitol on March 25, their number had swelled to twenty-five thousand.

The writer of Hebrews calls us to "run with perseverance the race marked out for us," surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. Those marchers understood something every believer must learn: perseverance does not mean the road gets easier. It means you cross the bridge again. You fix your eyes not on the troopers but on the destination. The faithful life is not one blow of suffering avoided — it is the second crossing, and the third, with your eyes set on the promise ahead.