The Wall That Fell in Berlin

On August 4, 1936, seventy thousand spectators packed the Olympic Stadium in Berlin as Jesse Owens, a Black sharecropper's son from Alabama, stepped to the long jump pit. He had already fouled twice in qualifying. One more foul and he was finished. That is when Luz Long, a tall German athlete and the hometown favorite, walked over. In full view of Adolf Hitler's regime — a government built on the doctrine of racial supremacy — Long offered Owens a quiet piece of advice: mark a spot several inches before the takeoff board to ensure a clean jump.

Owens qualified. Then he won the gold medal. Long took the silver.

What happened next stunned the crowd. Luz Long strode across the infield and embraced Jesse Owens in front of the world. They walked arm in arm before a stadium draped in swastikas. Owens later wrote, "It took a lot of courage for him to befriend me in front of Hitler. You can melt down all the medals and cups I have and they wouldn't be a plating on the twenty-four-karat friendship I felt for Luz Long." When Long was killed fighting in Sicily in 1943, the friendship did not die with him. His son Kai later reached out to the Owens family, and the two families remained connected for decades.

Ephesians 2:14 declares that Christ "has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility." What Nazi ideology built up between those two men, one act of grace tore down. That is what reconciliation looks like — not waiting for the walls to fall, but walking across the field while they still stand.