A Reason To Risk Your Safety (March 21, 2004)

On October 24, 1901, a 43-year-old schoolteacher named Anna Edson Taylor became the first person to plunge over Niagara Falls in a barrel. She had hoped to become rich off the stunt, but her attempts to parlay it into fortune failed miserably. The public shunned her lecture circuit, and she returned to Niagara Falls to make a meager living selling her autograph to tourists. She died penniless and bitter in 1921.

Grace Horsely Darling, on the other hand, sought no public acclaim for her watery ordeal. During a terrible storm on September 7, 1838, the frail 22-year-old daughter of a lighthouse keeper spotted some boat wreckage floating on the churning sea near their home on England's Farne Island. She summoned her father, who with his spyglass saw nine individuals clinging to a rock about a quarter mile offshore - the sole survivors of a shipwreck from the previous night. Knowing that these shipwreck victims faced certain death from the pounding waves if not rescued immediately, Grace and her father braved the North Sea gales in a 20-foot rowboat and somehow managed to save seven of them. (Two had perished).

News of Grace's heroism captured England's imagination. She was besieged with requests for pieces of the clothing she had worn during the rescue, and for so many locks of her hair that one pundit joked she faced the danger of baldness. Artists painted seascapes of the girl in the storm-tossed boat, and writers commemorated her deed in books and plays. But she never tried to capitalize on her fame, and she remained at the lighthouse with her family until she died of consumption four years later. Her legacy was the rapid growth of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, which flourished throughout the British Empire in the wake of her much-publicized heroism.

Two women defied the waters of death - one to benefit herself, the other to save people's lives. Adulation and fame eluded Anna Taylor, who bequeathed nothing more than a quirky example that inspired more barrel-riding Niagara Fools - some who would die, none of whom would do anybody any good. But a nation adored Grace Darling, who, through the inspiration she gave to lifeboat rescuers, saved many more lives than the seven she rescued in 1838.

The Bible says, "Should you seek great things for yourself? Seek them not" (Jeremiah 45:5). Instead it commands us, "Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit...Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others." (Philippians 2:3-4). If you ever have the urge to do something grand and dangerous, fraught with personal risk, make sure that you are doing it to benefit someone else, not to make yourself look big.