Flying and catching

I have been reading biographies of some of the great Christian leaders who have influenced my thinking over the years – people like A.W Tozer, John Stott, Watchmen Nee and most recently, Henri Nouwen. I love to learn about the details of their lives, to see how God shaped them for his purpose, and how they coped with trials and tribulations.

One interesting thing that emerged as I read a biography of Nouwen by Jurjen Beumer was the interest he had in the circus, and in particular in the trapeze artists. He was deeply impressed by a South African troupe called ‘The Flying Rodleighs’ whom he met in 1991. Nouwen believed that spiritual themes could be seen in the whole of life, and he saw something in the trapeze ‘story’ that he believed was a metaphor for the spiritual life. He determined to get to know them – their lives, their discipline, their fears, the thrills they enjoyed.

In the following years his friendship with The Rodleighs developed. He watched them, listened to their stories, learned to understand their techniques and studied the movements of their bodies. Gradually the trapeze ‘story’ began to emerge as a metaphor in his thinking about the Christian life.

One day Nouwen was sitting with Rodleigh the leader of the troupe in his caravan, talking about flying.

‘As a flyer I must have complete confidence in my catcher,’ said Rodleigh. ‘The public might think that I am the great 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.’

‘How does it work?’ asked Nouwen.

‘The secret,’ Rodleigh said, ‘is that the flyer does nothing and the catcher does everything. When I fly to Joe, I have simply to stretch out my arms and hands and wait for him to catch me and pull me safely over the apron behind the catch bar.’

‘You do nothing!’ said Nouwen, surprised.

‘Nothing,’ Rodleigh repeated. ‘The worst thing the flyer can do is to try to catch the catcher. I am not supposed to catch Joe. It’s Joe’s task to catch me. If I grabbed Joe’s wrists, I might break them, or he might break mine, and that would be the end of both of us. A flyer must fly, and a catcher must catch, and the flyer must trust, with outstretched arms, that his catcher will be there for him.’

I’ll leave it to you to work out the way this picture illustrates the Christian life, and to apply it to your own walk with God in the present moment.

The Blessing of God

On 1st January 1951, shortly before he was imprisoned by the Communists, Watchmen Nee gave to the church a New Year message on the significance of God’s blessing as seen in the miracle of the loaves. He wrote:

‘All service is dependent upon the blessing of God. We may be very conscientious and very diligent, we may believe in his power and may pray to him to put it forth, but if the blessing of God is lacking, then all our conscientiousness, all out diligence, all our faith, and all our prayer is in vain. On the other hand, even though we make mistakes, and even though the situation we face be a hopeless one, provided we have the blessing of God there will be a fruitful issue….

This lesson is not easily learned. The hopes of so many are still centred, not on the blessing of the Lord but on the few loaves in their hand. It is so pitifully little we have in hand, and yet we keep reckoning with it; and the more we reckon the harder the work becomes. My brothers and sisters, miracles issue from the blessing of the Lord. Only let that be upon the loaves and they will be multiplied. Where the blessing of God rests the thousands are fed…

We should be able to trust the blessing of God and wait for it. And we should often find that, even where we had bungled things, somehow all was well. A little bit of blessing can carry us over a great deal of trouble.

What is ‘blessing’? It is the working of God where there is nothing to account for his working… When five loaves provide food for five thousand and leave twelve baskets of fragments, that is blessing. When the fruit of your service is out of all proportion to the gifts you possess, that is blessing. Or to be rather extreme, when, taking account of your failures, there should be no fruit from your labours, and still there is fruit, that is blessing. Many of us only expect results commensurate with what we are in ourselves, but blessing is fruit that is out of all correspondence with what we are…

A life of blessing should be our normal life as Christians and a work with the blessing of God upon it should be our normal work. ‘Prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.’ (Malachi 3:10)