When Faith Walked Across Niagara Falls - The Book of Amazing Stories

When Faith Walked across Niagara Falls

Niagara Falls is some kind of monster. Less than a handful of daredevils have challenged its fury and lived to tell about it. It’s no wonder that more than one hundred thousand spectators gathered there and millions more tuned in to ABC to watch Nik Wallenda’s death-defying aerial feat.

Nothing was left to chance in June of 2012. A 1,800-foot-long, two-inch-thick steel cable weighing seven tons was pulled across the falls by machines, stretched taut, and then secured by bolts driven deep into bedrock. Supporting cables were attached to the main wire to make sure it couldn’t sway. The aerial artist wore the latest high-tech clothing and shoes. His sponsors required that he wear a harness that tethered him safely to the high wire. Protected by all these precautions, Wallenda completed the walk to the delight of the crowd, ABC television, his corporate sponsors, and his nervous family.

If only you could have been there on June 30, 1859. This time the daredevil was the Great Blondin. His aerial acrobatics had thrilled audiences across the world. Yet Niagara Falls would be the Frenchman’s greatest challenge. Blondin didn’t take the same precautions that Nik Wallenda would take some 150 years later. Instead of a steel cable, he walked on a two-inch-thick Manila rope. No machines pulled it taut, and no cables held it steady. He refused to wear a safety harness. Instead of high-tech gear, he donned Turkish pantaloons and Persian slippers. He carried a wooden pole five times heavier than Wallenda’s. Because his high wire was a 1,300-foot stretch of rope, Blondin walked downhill to the middle, some fifty feet below where he began, and back uphill to the end.

Wallenda performed his aerial extravaganza once. Blondin did his daredevil feats repeatedly over two summers, each time doing something more stupefying. He crossed that Manila rope on a bicycle, on stilts, and in the pitch black of night. Once he pushed a stove on a wheelbarrow and cooked an omelet high over the falls. On another occasion he climbed into a gunnysack blindfolded and then shuffled across that rope. As amazing as Wallenda’s one feat might have seemed in 2012, Blondin’s many stunts were far more electrifying in 1859.

But history mostly recalls that day when he asked ten thousand spectators if they believed that he could carry a man on his shoulders across Niagara Falls. The crowd responded with a roar of affirmation. He retorted, “Who then will get up on my back?” No one moved. So Blondin turned to his manager, Harry Colcord, and ordered him to climb up on his shoulders. Colcord was petrified, but he had promoted the Frenchman too long to back down. He later said that his half-hour ride on Blondin’s shoulders was an eternity of terror.

Faith is not a spectator sport. It’s one thing to experience adventure vicariously through someone else’s high-risk faith. It’s quite another to walk the high wire yourself. Today God may call you to climb on his shoulders and cross over some scary place. If so, something Corrie ten Boom wrote might help:

Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.

Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.

Hebrews 11:1, NIV