A Step Of Faith: Nik Wallenda Walks Over Masaya Volcano To Chase Greatness And Shows How Anyone Can Live A Life Of Meaning

One of the greatest athletes I know will spend tomorrow night doing something extraordinary: at 8:00 PM Eastern, aerialist Nik Wallenda will step out onto a 1,800-foot high wire strung across the active Masaya volcano in Nicaragua. Every step (or misstep) of the journey will be captured by ABC and broadcast live to the planet. It’s just the latest of Wallenda’s death-defying walks above the world.

I met Wallenda last year, after a mutual friend. John C. Maxwell, suggested we connect. To be honest, I didn’t know much about him or his legendary family, The Flying Wallendas, but I had what I felt was a decent appreciation for their performance niche. As someone who’s always interested in finding out what makes Great athletes tick, I was open to the conversation, even if I wasn’t exactly sure at that time if I should consider Wallenda an athlete.

I mean, he walks for a living.

Sure, it’s on a one-inch wire suspended hundreds of feet above the ground, usually across some daunting obstacle like the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls, but it’s…walking.

I couldn’t have been more wrong in my assessment. I was able to spend a few days with Nik and his family, including his wife Erendira, who’s also an aerialist and acrobat, and I was blown away by the level of athleticism required to do what Nik does. He’s not only got to have the fitness needed to walk confidently across a wobbling wire, he’s got to have balance, full-body coordination, and a mental strength unlike anything else in modern sports.

It’s one thing to think a safety might nail you in the mid-section and take your breath away on a pass play, it’s an entirely different thing to think that one wrong step might send you tumbling into a volcano with molten lava bubbling beneath you.

And that’s entirely possible because Nik, in keeping with his family’s tradition, doesn’t use safety netting. In fact, he prefers not to use safety gear at all, unless it is required by the government where he’s performing, as was the case at Niagara Falls or when he and his sister, Lijana, walked across Times Square, 25 stories above the crowd. The state of New York required a safety tether in both cases.

When he strolls across Masaya, he’ll have nothing to help him except his training and skill.

“I could fall to my death,” he said rather casually in a call we had last week. “It’s what I do.”

At Masaya, what he plans will be unlike anything he’s done before. There’s not only the length of the walk—500 feet further than his Times Square crossing—there’s also the winds—which will be stronger than those he faced over the Grand Canyon—and there’s the roiling lava lake below—which is decidedly different from the churning falls of Niagara. Then, there are gases from the volcano which will require Wallenda to wear a mask and oxygen, as well as the heat, which will require him to wear modified shoes to counteract the intense temperatures.

At this point, you’re probably asking yourself the same question I asked him when I first met him: WHY?

“Because this is what I was born to do,” he told me then, and he’s committed to living out that purpose. Everything that Wallenda does is to challenge himself and his gifting, to push himself beyond his comfort zone and into the fullest expression of his capabilities.

He’s paid for it—in 2017 while attempting a world record eight-person pyramid walk, he watched as his sister Lijana and other family members plummeted some thirty feet to the ground below. Lijana was gravely injured, and Wallenda, for the first time in his career, felt genuine fear on the wire.

But he kept pushing, and last June, he and Lijana walked a 1,300-foot wire suspended 25 stories above Times Square as a testimony of her recovery. For Wallenda, it was part of his healing too. So much so, he’s writing a book about the experience.

It’s like he told Reuters ahead of the Masaya walk: “I will tell you that my first step I take will be a step of faith. It’s not as though I’m fearless. It is more about me overcoming that fear.”

To me, that’s Greatness in action. Wallenda could’ve settled for the life of performers before him, doing the same act night in and night out. But he understood that he had more within him than just circus stunts. He pushed himself to train beyond his limits, think beyond the familiar, and to stretch for goals beyond his reach because that’s what would push him to be his very best.

Greatness doesn’t come to us—we must chase it, and that’s what Wallenda would say to any of us reading this post. You have to exercise a combination of faith and confidence, set aside the voice of fear, and take the first step toward the life that you dream of.

It will always be a step of faith, but the reward is greater than you could imagine. I hope you’ll be watching with me as Nik takes that first step Wednesday!