Going Over Backwards

At the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, a lanky twenty-one-year-old engineering student named Dick Fosbury did something no one had ever seen in elite competition. While every other high jumper used the traditional straddle technique — approaching the bar and rolling over it face-down — Fosbury sprinted toward it, turned his back, arched his spine, and flopped over headfirst.

The crowd gasped. Commentators were baffled. His own coaches at Oregon State had spent years trying to correct what they called a flawed technique. But Fosbury trusted what felt right in his bones, even when no one else understood it. He cleared seven feet, four and a quarter inches that day and took home Olympic gold. Within a decade, nearly every high jumper in the world had adopted what became known as the Fosbury Flop.

Faith often asks us to move in directions that look wrong to everyone watching. The Almighty told Abraham to leave everything familiar. He told Joshua to march around walls instead of scaling them. He told a shepherd boy to face a giant with five smooth stones.

Hebrews 11:1 calls faith "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Sometimes trusting God means turning your back on what the world insists is the only sensible path — and discovering that His way, strange as it looks, is the one that carries you over.