The Catheter He Threaded Into His Own Heart

In 1929, a twenty-five-year-old German surgeon named Werner Forssmann was convinced that a thin tube could be safely guided into the chambers of a living human heart. His supervisors told him it was suicide. The medical establishment said a catheter touching the heart would trigger fatal cardiac arrest. Every authority above him said no.

So Forssmann did what courage sometimes demands — he went first. He made a small incision in his own arm, threaded a urethral catheter into his antecubital vein, and guided it sixty-five centimeters through his venous system until it reached his right atrium. Then, with a catheter sitting inside his own beating heart, he walked down a flight of stairs to the radiology department and stood behind a fluoroscope to take the X-ray that proved it could be done.

He was fired for it. The medical community dismissed him as reckless. It took twenty-seven years before the Nobel committee awarded him the prize he deserved.

There is a kind of courage that says, "If no one else will go, I will go myself." Scripture is full of it. Moses approaching the bush. Esther approaching the throne. Jesus approaching the cross. Each one moved toward the very thing that others said would kill them.

Your congregation does not need a faith that watches from a safe distance. They need the faith of Forssmann — the willingness to say, "I believe this is true, and I will stake my own body on it." That is not recklessness. That is conviction with skin on.