Care Instructions for a Life Worth Living

Trusting the Catcher

Letting go is always an act of trust. In a trapeze act, there is the flyer and the catcher. Think about this exchange between the flyer and an interviewer: “As a flyer, I must have complete trust in my catcher. The public might think I’m the star of the trapeze, but the real star is Joe, my catcher. He has to be there for me with split-second precision and grab me out of the air as I come to him in the long jump. The secret is that the flyer does nothing. The catcher does everything. When I fly to Joe, I have simply to stretch out my arms and hands and wait.” The interviewer asked him, “You do nothing?” “A flyer must fly and a catcher must catch. The flyer must trust with outstretched arms that his catcher will be there waiting for him.”

“Do not let your hearts be troubled,” Jesus said. “Trust in God; trust also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you.” (John 14:1–2, NIV)

Maybe you’re standing on the side of the cliff, stuck on if; wondering, “Can I entrust myself to him? Can I commit myself even though I doubt? If I take a leap, will he catch me?” I know something about how if works. I know that if you never believe, if you never trust, you will never know.

It is sometimes called “unbelief” in the Bible, but it is very different than uncertainty. This is the severest form of doubt gone wrong. Unbelief is refusal to trust. It is not uncertainty in the intellect; it is a settled decision of the will.

The rebel is not simply someone who doesn’t believe. He or she is someone who doesn’t want to believe. Rebels do not want the story of Jesus to be true. They do not want to live in the universe governed by the kind of Father whom Jesus himself trusted and described. And this desire goes so deep that it colors the way they look at every argument and every bit of evidence and makes sure they find a way not to believe.

Jesus said to Peter, James, and John, “The Son of Man must suffer much and be rejected” (Mark 9:12), and (in so many words) “You’ll have to walk through it with me. You’ll have to go through confusion and doubt; you’ll have to ask questions and struggle. There will be a crucifixion. Then there will be a resurrection, and on the other side, the day is coming when you are going to soar, but not yet. Not today. Today you have to trust me. We’re going to have to go down off the mountain.”

There is simply no one more worth trusting than Jesus. There is no one whose understanding of life has come close to his. There is no one who affected history like him. There is simply no other source — no book, no guru, no hunch, and no personal experience— worth betting the farm on.
Do you trust the catcher enough to let go?