Tightrope Walker

“There was a world-famous tightrope walker, who had reached the age where he wanted to retire. But before he retired he wanted to do something spectacular, something no one else had ever done. So he decided he was going to stretch a tightrope across Niagara Falls and walk across that rope. “As you know, at Niagara Falls the wind blow quite hard, and if the spray from the falls got on the rope it could become very slick. They advertised his walk on television, newspaper, and on the radio.

The moment of truth came, and there were thousands of people who came to see him. No one had ever done this before, and as the tightrope walker steps onto the platform and balances himself on the rope, the whole crowd starts to cheer, yell and scream. He gets about halfway across, carrying his long, long pole in his hands, when he slips and almost falls. The crowd is petrified. They think he is going to fall but he regains his balance and makes it across. The crowd erupts. They have never seen anything like it. “He had done the impossible, and now he turns around to go back. The crowd screams, ‘Oh no, he’s not going back again.’ Sure enough, he picks up his pole and starts back. About three-quarters of the way, he again slips and almost falls. The crowd is again somewhat petrified, but he regains his balance and they clap, but not as much.

Now he gets a wheelbarrow, and the crowd says, ‘Oh, no, surely he’s not going to try to push that wheelbarrow across.’ About a quarter of the way over he slips but regains his balance, and boy, oh boy, the crowd erupts again. Wow! He’d done something no else had ever done. “So he turns around and puts the wheelbarrow back on the rope and the crowd yells, ‘You’re not going to do that again, are you?’ And he says, ‘Do you believe that I could put somebody in the wheelbarrow and roll it across?’ The crowd says, ‘We believe, we believe.’ And he points to this one guy and says, ‘Alright – you first!’ “

This is the difference between belief and trust. It’s easy to believe, but the trust to sit in that wheelbarrow is quite a different thing.