The Letter from Sicily

In August 1936, the Olympic Stadium in Berlin was packed as Adolf Hitler watched from his private box. On the field below, two long jumpers competed for gold — Jesse Owens, a Black sharecropper's son from Oakville, Alabama, and Luz Long, Germany's blue-eyed, blond-haired champion. Owens won gold. Long took silver.

What happened next defied everything the Nazi regime stood for. Long was the first to congratulate Owens, and the two walked arm-in-arm before the stunned Berlin crowd. "You can melt down all the medals and cups I have," Owens later wrote, "and they wouldn't be a plating on the twenty-four-karat friendship I felt for Luz Long."

Their bond endured through letters across the Atlantic even as war consumed Europe. In 1943, serving as a German soldier in Sicily, Long penned one final letter. He asked Owens to find his son Karl after the war and tell the boy about their friendship — about what two men from different worlds could mean to each other. Luz Long died from his wounds on July 14, 1943.

Jesus said, "Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends" (John 15:13). Long staked his reputation and standing to extend friendship across the deepest divide of his era. True bridge-building has always been costly. It asks us to reach across lines the world insists cannot be crossed, and to love the people we are told we should not.