Psalm 54:4 - Behold, God is my helper; The Lord is with those who uphold my life.
Linda’s grandmother lived in Helen, Georgia. The road from our house in South Carolina to Helen went through Toccoa and past the boyhood home of Paul Anderson.
In 1955, Paul Anderson was, at the last minute, asked to join an American team to fly to Moscow and compete against the Soviet weightlifting team. In front of 15,000 people in Gorky Park, the Soviet champion lifted his personal best of 330 lbs. Paul Anderson asked for 402.4 lbs to be placed on the bar, 20 pounds over the existing world record. After Paul completed the historic lift, the crowd was silent for ten seconds and then erupted in applause. As a weightlifter, he was an Olympic gold medalist, a world champion, and a two-time national champion.
In the Olympics in 1956, Anderson famously missed his first two attempts at the clean and jerk world record of 413.5 pounds. He asked God for help and successfully lifted the staggering amount for a gold medal and a world record. Later Anderson said: “I wasn’t making a bargain, I needed help.” Anderson would devote the rest of his life to sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ so that everyone in need of a helper could have Christ.
On June 12, 1957, Anderson back lifted a table calibrated with weights totaling 6,270 pounds off the ground. The Guinness Book of World Records called it the greatest weight ever raised by a human being. If the strongest man who ever lived needed the help of the Lord, where does that leave us?