Trusting the Catcher
“When I thought, ‘My foot slips,’ your steadfast love, O Lord, held me up.” Psalm 94:18 (ESV)
As a child, did you love the circus? The spectacle, the animals, the clowns (who doesn’t love clowns?), the excitement. But perhaps one of the most thrilling acts in the circus wasn’t on the ground, it was overhead – the trapeze. As the song from 1867 memorialized, “the daring young man on the flying trapeze.”
Every trapeze act has a moment the whole tent holds its breath. The flyer swings out, reaches the top of the arc, and lets go of the bar. For a heartbeat, maybe more, that person is holding nothing. The bar is behind them, the catcher’s hands are still across the gap, and the only thing working on the flyer is gravity.
Trapeze artists aren’t the only ones who know that moment. Most of us have known it from the inside.
A job ends before the next one begins. A test result comes back, and the follow-up appointment is three weeks out. A child moves away, a marriage changes shape, or a call to serve stretches us past anything we’ve tried.
We let go of what was familiar because God asked us to, and now we’re in the air, wondering whether anyone’s on the other side. Picture it this way: we’re the flyer, and God is the catcher.
The Catcher in the Thicket
Abraham knew that moment on Mount Moriah. God had commanded him to offer Isaac, the son he’d waited twenty-five years for, the son through whom God’s promise was to run. Abraham let go of the bar. He told his servants, “I and the boy will go over there and worship and come again to you” (Genesis 22:5), and when Isaac asked where the lamb was, Abraham answered, “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son” (Genesis 22:8).
Hebrews 11:19 tells us what drove that answer: “He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead.” Abraham couldn’t see the catcher, but he knew the catcher’s record. He’d watched God give him a son when Sarah’s body was past childbearing. When the angel called out from heaven, Abraham looked up and found a ram caught in a thicket by its horns (Genesis 22:13).
The Catcher on the Lake
Peter lived it on a lake. Before dawn he saw Jesus coming toward the boat across the water and called out, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” Jesus said, “Come” (Matthew 14:28-29).
Peter climbed over the side, which is the closest thing the Gospels give us to releasing the bar. Then the wind got his attention. “when he saw the wind, he was afraid, and beginning to sink he cried out, ‘Lord, save me.’ Jesus immediately reached out his hand and took hold of him” (Matthew 14:30-31).
Matthew’s word is “immediately.” Jesus didn’t wait for Peter’s faith to steady. The catcher was already moving, and Peter’s part was to cry out and reach.
The Catcher in Mid-Air
Henri Nouwen spent his last years fascinated by a trapeze troupe called the Flying Rodleighs. His trapeze writings were published in 2024 as Flying, Falling, Catching, assembled by his colleague Carolyn Whitney-Brown. The point Nouwen kept coming back to is that the flyer flies and the catcher catches, and when either one tries to do the other’s job, things go wrong.
In Deuteronomy 33:27 Moses said something similar over Israel in his final blessing before he died: “The eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.” Those arms reach across the gap, and they’re under the flyer too.
Mid-air is the hardest part, because nothing feels like it’s happening. Abraham walked for three days toward Moriah with no preview of the ending. Peter had a few steps on rough water.
Joshua’s priests got the same lesson at the Jordan, which was overflowing its banks at harvest time. God told them to carry the ark into the river, and the water didn’t stand up in a heap until their feet touched its edge (Joshua 3:15-16). They had to step before anything changed.
Not one of these individuals saw the catch ahead of time, and all of them received it.
The Catcher in Our Lives
If God has asked you to release something this fall, a position, a plan, a version of your life you’d gotten comfortable in, the gap you’re in right now doesn’t mean He’s gone. Jesus said of His own, “no one will snatch them out of my hand” (John 10:28).
So stretch out your hands, resist the urge to grab, and wait for Him to take hold.
Reflect: Where has God asked you to let go of a bar, and what’s keeping you from stretching out your hands? What moment of His past faithfulness can you point to, the way Abraham could point to Isaac’s birth, as proof the Catcher shows up?
May God always guide your path.