The Man Who Jumped Backwards

At the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, a lanky engineering student from Portland, Oregon did something no one had ever seen. While every other high jumper approached the bar face-first using the traditional straddle technique, Dick Fosbury turned his back to it. He sprinted toward the bar, planted his foot, and arched backward over it — spine curved, face to the sky.

The crowd gasped. Commentators were bewildered. Fellow athletes thought he was foolish. His own coaches at Oregon State had spent years trying to correct him. But Fosbury kept perfecting a technique that defied every conventional rule of the sport.

When the competition ended, Dick Fosbury stood on the podium with an Olympic gold medal. Within a decade, virtually every high jumper in the world had abandoned the old way and adopted his method — now known as the Fosbury Flop.

Faith often asks us to move in directions that look wrong to everyone watching. Hebrews 11 is filled with people who, by the world's measure, were jumping backwards — Noah building a boat in a desert, Abraham leaving home for a land he had never seen, Moses choosing suffering over a palace. They trusted what they could not yet prove.

Sometimes the step of faith the Almighty asks you to take will look foolish to the people around you. But the God who sees the whole arc of your life knows exactly how high you can go — if you will trust Him enough to turn around and leap.