ONE OF THE TOUGHEST THINGS ABOUT FACING FEAR is that the process never ends. The second you have tackled one fear, another is there waiting. It’s like that Whac-A-Mole game at the county fair!
We live in a broken world, and that means things rarely work the way we plan or expect. Even after you discipline yourself to face your fears, find your footing, and focus on your future, there are still going to be moments when you are simply overwhelmed. When this happens, it’s easy to get down on yourself. You know what you need to do but struggle to apply the lessons, and then discouragement comes along and makes you feel even worse. Throughout my career, I’ve experienced this sort of thing time and time again, so much so that I’ve come to really appreciate the power behind something Jesus said to his disciples in John 16: “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (v. 33).
I leaned into that verse a lot in 2019 and 2020. In addition to working on this book and working my way through the whole process of overcoming fear, I was simultaneously working on the most dangerous wire walk of my career. On March 4, 2020, in a special broadcast live on ABC, I walked 1,800 feet across the open mouth of the Masaya volcano in Nicaragua. It is one of the world’s most active volcanoes, with molten lava bubbling up constantly from its center. Nothing I’ve ever done can even come close to matching the intensity and danger of that walk, which is why I can look back now and say that I should’ve expected the trouble that came my way. I should have known that a walk that big, that audacious, would draw as many attacks from Satan as possible. But I was a bit fooled, because the problems I encountered weren’t the usual big problems that crop up early with this kind of stunt.
The time leading up to an event like this is always busy, and busyness can of course be overwhelming. There’s all of the media requirements and all of the meetings and phone calls. Maybe there’s a challenge with booking hotel rooms or a struggle to effectively manage the shipping manifest for the equipment. And I haven’t even mentioned the time it takes to finalize plans with all the various agencies and partners involved in a production like this. There are many details that have to be checked and rechecked, but just a few weeks before showtime, I felt like everything was falling into place step by step. For a time, I thought I had beaten fear.
But that’s when the problems began cropping up.
Here’s the thing about problems: when they come one at a time, they’re easy to handle. They can be inconvenient, sure, but once you find solutions and move past them, they become just a memory. But when problems cascade—when a bunch of things start going wrong all at once—it doesn’t take much for that to trigger a fear snowball, one huge anxiety you can’t control.
That’s exactly what happened to me. As I began my training, I decided to shift my thinking. I mentioned in chapter 10 that I never get on a wire thinking, Gosh, this is easy! For most of my career, I’ve tried to think about the worst possible scenario so I could prepare myself for it—no matter how unlikely it might be. But as I started training for Masaya, my mindset was different; the hard work of facing my fears after the Sarasota accident and learning to grow through that process was starting to pay dividends. I think part of it was a realization of how tired that negative approach was making me; how I was doing damage to my own psyche by constantly thinking about worst-case scenarios. So I made the decision to begin visualizing myself walking on the best wire of my career. I began asking myself, What would happen if things went well? What if the winds at the center of the volcano weren’t that bad?
As a result, my first few training sessions went incredibly well. Thinking positive—and staying positive—translated into my practice and allowed me to accelerate my program a bit. Soon, however, I started having a bunch of pains in my knee and ankle, pains that I hadn’t felt in a long time. I figured it was the sort of thing that came with age, so while it was annoying, I knew I would just have to work through it. I’d have to take care of myself and not get too much in my head whenever I felt a small twinge of pain, or else I’d run the risk of turning a molehill into a mountain. I should have kept that in mind not just for myself but for my wife as well. It would have spared her a lot of pain—and spared all of us a lot of anxiety.
A few months before the walk, we decided that Erendira would open the show dangling from a lyra under a helicopter. My wife would essentially hang by her toes on a hoop attached to the bottom of a helicopter, all while performing beautiful aerial ballet. The act would culminate with her hanging by nothing but her teeth. We added this performance not only to showcase my wife and her amazing skills but to create extra interest for the viewers.
In early February, about a month before the special, my broadcast partners at Dick Clark Productions sent a film crew to Sarasota to shoot some packages of us training. These short clips would be used to take viewers behind the scenes at different points during the broadcast to help them understand how we prepared for these performances. Even though we knew Erendira would be on the lyra under the helicopter, we didn’t want to spoil the surprise for the viewers. So when the film crew arrived, we agreed we weren’t going to show anything she was actually doing. That meant we had to come up with other ideas, so one of the crew members said, “Why don’t we do something to sweeten this part of the package? Why don’t you guys do a pyramid on the wire with her on top?”
We talked it over, and a simple pyramid was something we knew we could do with zero problems. As we made our way to the wire, Erendira pulled me aside and said, “I’m going to do a split.”
We’d done this hundreds of times before, so I said, “Great!”
We got up on the wire, and everything was going well until we got out into the middle. Right when Erendira should’ve revealed her big trick, she did nothing. She didn’t do the split.
Once we got to the opposite platform, I asked her, “Why didn’t you do the split?”
“It just didn’t feel right. I felt like I shouldn’t do it.”
Granted, we were doing a trick we hadn’t really prepared for, and even though we’re seasoned pros, it had still been a while since she’d done this trick out on the wire. I could tell she was uncomfortable, but it seemed silly. So I decided to give her a little tough love.
“You need to stop letting it get into your head,” I told her. “You need to do the split.”
We reset for another take, letting the camera crews adjust angles and everything, and the second time we went out, Erendira said again, “I don’t feel comfortable.”
“Stop letting it get into your head!” I hissed. “We’re in the middle of the wire. You need to do the split.”
Erendira nodded, and as she went down into her split, she suddenly felt an incredible pain in her leg. I know when my wife is truly in pain, and I knew immediately we had to get down from the wire and get her some help. I literally carried her to the car and rushed her to a friend of ours, Dr. David Sugar, who is an orthopedic surgeon. Even though it was after-hours when we called him, he stayed in his office late so we could get her examined. After X-rays and a CT scan, our friend came back with his diagnosis.
“It’s a torn hamstring, which means two to three months of recovery time. You’ve got to take it easy. You can’t do much, and you certainly can’t train.”
A torn hamstring with a month to go before the special. It was miserable news, and I felt horrible. Even though Erendira told me she was uncomfortable, I pushed her through what I thought was a mental block, and she suffered for it. She told me later she believed the unease she felt was the Holy Spirit saying to her, Don’t do it. And there I was saying she should!
It was a difficult hurdle thrown our way, and we still had the film crew there for more shooting. We didn’t tell anyone what was going on, even though they were filming. I don’t think to this day they fully realized the magnitude of Erendira’s injury. She couldn’t walk at first, which made her very upset. We didn’t know what to do besides pray about it. Luckily, she is extremely healthy; as a vegetarian, she eats really well, so she adjusted her diet to include a healthy vegetable juice in the morning. After about ten days she began recovering, and she was back to practice soon after that. By the time the special aired on March 4, she was 90 percent recovered.
But you can see how the cascade started, with her injury being the first setback; that exhibition of her skill on live television was something she was so excited about, something she really wanted to do. If that had been the only setback, it would’ve been enough. But during this same window, we had an issue with a shipping container for some of our gear. We had to get the rigging down to Nicaragua well in advance of the special to see how everything would hold up over the volcano, and we ran into challenges getting some of the containers down there. It was a problem, but it was happening far enough out that it was an inconvenience more than a major concern.
While that was happening, I was upping my training by adding in all the safety equipment we felt I would need for the walk. The Masaya volcano spits out an enormous amount of sulfuric gases and ash, which meant I wouldn’t be able to walk across without my face being covered or without emergency oxygen. I was doing my best to get prepared physically and mentally, walking up to a mile a day on the wire while wearing an oxygen tank with a gas mask, along with a weighted harness on my chest. So in the middle of some of my hardest, most tedious training, I was dealing with shipping-container issues while nursing an injured wife.
Long story short, I was reacting so well that I felt like my psyche was borderline bulletproof. My rehearsal wire was very loose, so I knew if I could handle myself on that one, I’d be more than prepared for the stabler wire over the volcano. Mentally and physically, I felt strong. I was punching fear in the face. More good news: most of the gear was on the ground, and the rigging team was getting the wire strung up across the volcano’s mouth. My dad was scheduled to go down near the end of February and oversee the rigging process for me. The cascade of problems seemed to be slowing.
“Nik, we have a major concern.”
My dad was down in Nicaragua for his inspection, and he had called me on the phone. Mind you, I told my team I didn’t want to hear anything negative once they got down there. I only wanted to hear positive things because I needed to keep my mind in a positive place. As they loaded to head south, I had given them all—Dad included—one last instruction: “Don’t tell me the bad stuff happening down there. You’re the best, and you’re there for one purpose. Whatever happens, just figure things out.”
I hoped that would be the case, but this was my dad saying, “We have a problem.” Suddenly my mind accelerated a million miles an hour in every wrong direction. Dad laid out the situation for me: the riggers had run a rope across the center of the volcano to help them set up the wire. Overnight they left two carabiners—little circle clips used in mountain climbing—in the middle of their rope, and when Dad and the team reeled them in, they noticed that the carabiners were covered in a greasy substance.
“We don’t know what it is,” he said. “We’re not really sure what’s going on, but for some reason it appears that the volcano is emitting some sort of greasy substance that none of us can figure out.”
Our team had studied the Masaya volcano for nearly two years at that point, so what my dad was saying made no sense—not scientifically, anyway. “Dad, I don’t get it. What are we dealing with?”
“We don’t know. We’re going to have to do a bunch more research.”
I was irritated. “Dad, I told you I didn’t want to hear bad news. This is bad news.”
“I know,” he said, “but as your father, I can’t not tell you. You need to train and prepare for this. Me and Uncle Mike, we’re going to work on the problem, and we’ll see what we can figure out.”
He called me the next day. “The good news is we don’t think it’s necessarily grease, but it’s certainly a very slippery substance. There appears to be high levels of humidity mixing with the gas and some small particles in the air that the volcano is emitting. It creates this very fine dust that feels and looks just like grease. I sent you a picture.”
My phone dinged as the picture came in. He was right—it did look just like grease.
“Okay,” I said. “What next?”
“Here’s what I want you to do—I want you to go online and buy some bags of sand that they use for rock tumbling, the kind used to clean up stones and stuff. Buy that, sprinkle it on the wire, spray it down with some water, and walk on that.”
“Dad, that doesn’t make sense. I don’t think that’s going to do anything for me.”
He said, “Well, I don’t know what else to tell you. We’ll keep working.”
The next night they stayed late. They brought some high-wattage lights that allowed them to use binoculars to examine the middle of the wire. The wire was literally dripping, almost as if it were melting. When Dad called, he said, “It looks like the wire at Niagara Falls—it’s just covered in this substance, all in the middle of the wire.”
By this point, I was not sleeping at all. Days of uncertainty about the wire and what was causing the weird substance—let alone how that substance might affect my walk—meant no possibility of sleep whatsoever.
The next morning, I woke up and did something I’ve never done before. I went into my bathroom cupboard, grabbed a giant jar of Vaseline, and went out to my rehearsal wire. I marked off one area about fifteen feet long and I covered it in Vaseline.
Then I started walking on it back and forth.
At that point, we were just weeks away from the show, so I was fully committed; there was no turning back. I had to figure out how I was going to walk on a cable covered in grease, so I started training on a fully greased wire. It actually went well, and I quickly learned that the grease wouldn’t really affect me aside from my traction. Since the wire at the volcano wasn’t too steep, I wasn’t overly concerned with traction.
I ended up training on that wire quite a bit. Day after day I felt better and even started to feel confident. But every time I started to feel good, more little things would crop up. I’m always very sensitive before my walks anyway, but the mounting pressure wasn’t helping. I was out to dinner one night, and someone at a table near me said something with the word fall in it—something like, “I love fall; it’s my favorite season.” As soon as I heard “fall,” my heart immediately started racing. I didn’t want to hear that word come out of anyone’s mouth, even if they just happened to be around me. Casual conversation was now bothering me!
The cascade was in full effect. Basically, my mind was eaten up with worry—so when my dad called me to tell me of another challenge, I mentally fell off a cliff. There were so many things that kept adding up; it seemed like bad news kept coming and coming and coming, so I pulled out my phone and captured what I was thinking.
I want to share these raw thoughts with you to help you understand how easily fear can overwhelm a person, even someone who has worked so hard to overcome it. Here’s what I wrote:
February 20 9:19 PM
My dad calls and says he is going out on the wire right to the middle via the rigging carts, to see how bad the conditions may be.
He tells me he will call me as soon as he gets back in to let me know how it is. He then says we have concerns of heat tubes and says he has to go!
I’m at Cheesecake Factory in Sarasota after a long day of media interviews and meetings and practicing on the wire. A very windy day of practice on the wire.
My feet are sore from all of the practice.
My mind starts to torment me. Heat tubes? What is a heat tube? Is the wire going to be hot? Did we somehow miss something in our studies leading up to this point? I’m now less than 2 weeks out. How will I prepare? What will I have to wear? Are my shoes going to protect my feet? I already ordered food prior to the call, but I can’t eat. It sucks, since I don’t want my family to see the war raging in my head. How can I fake that I am fine? They don’t need to worry. This is an issue I have to deal with. What good does worry do for me, let alone them?
We finish dinner and I get my food packed up. We are heading home for the night. The entire 25-minute car ride home I am waiting for my dad to call. Please God let him bring me good news. Please God. Dear Jesus. God, I really need good news!
And the phone is silent. 30 minutes go by; surely he should have called by now. 45 minutes go by. Something must be terribly wrong! Don’t be stupid; control your thoughts. 1 hour goes by; it’s really bad, I know it! Control your thoughts! 1:15 goes by; my mind is racing. I decide to shower and play Bethel’s “Raise a Hallelujah.” Trying to sing louder than the horrible thoughts racing through my mind. 2 hours go by. I’m freaking out. Every single bad thought of the worst case scenarios is eating me alive. I feel like I am being choked, I feel like I am being tormented . . . I feel like I am being an idiot. God has always been there for me. He has never let me down, but like the Israelites I just can’t seem to learn to just trust in him. Every walk I’ve done he has been there! They start out with a hailstorm leading up to the walk, but he always delivers, yet I still lack faith.
As I lay in bed waiting for a report back from my earthly father I began to lack trust in my heavenly Father. It’s an emotional roller coaster with stress levels like I’ve never experienced before. From stressful news of an oily wire to better news that it seems to be sandy not oily, back to concerns of heat to great news report on the conditions in the middle of the wire.
I lay waiting and in an emotional battle, a war in my head! I began to “sing a little louder,” but sadly it wasn’t loud enough, so I began to read the Word, and that wasn’t easing the gunfire. I began to come against the attacks of Satan in Jesus’ name and cast out the thoughts burning holes in my heart. I fought and fought and fought and praised and worshiped and prayed and read. My mind was in my control and no one other than myself.
Finally my wife says just text him, but she doesn’t know I already did, and he didn’t respond—only adding fuel to my emotional fire.
I decide I will text him on WhatsApp since he is international: “Did you make it back to the hotel?”
It’s 11:26 p.m.
I see he reads the text but nothing for what seems like an eternity, but then after 90 seconds he responds.
“On my way back now.”
Now my heart is racing at 900 mph. What does he have to say? Is it good? Is it bad? I start asking him questions.
At this point, I want to share with you the text chain with my dad. He spent two hours on the edge of an active volcano doing everything he could to get me every answer he could. Looking back at this now, I can feel the anxiety in my words, and the comfort and peace in his. But in those moments, I was literally unaware of either.
Me: Okay. Were you able to check the wire?
Him: Yes.
The middle?
Yes.
How was it?
Super.
Did the gas mask work?
Very well.
Praise God. What about the goggles?
Goggles were great.
Heat?
Mild and occasional blasts.
Feels like hot for a few seconds, then fine, and then cool.
What’s the experience in the crater, around the edge?
Moisture?
Yes. But don’t think it will affect your grip at all.
So all in all, do you feel better?
Yes. Big gusts of wind in your face, but not so bad.
That’s what I practiced in today in Sarasota!
Good practice.
Thank God for that great news.
Amen. He is in charge.
Were you able to remove the gas mask?
That’s a no go.
Oxygen tanks?
We weren’t doing anything physical, we were fine.
This is all such encouraging news. After a rough start to the day, thank you, Jesus.
Happy you went out there yourself. Really, really helped my confidence and comfort level.
Thank you so much.
Love you, my son. You’re a blessing to the Lord.
I don’t know why God chose me, but
I know he will get all the glory.
I picked up my phone and finished typing my thoughts into my note:
What did I learn? I learned that God supplies ALL of my needs. ALL of them. He even supplies my emotional needs. Why do I continually have to go through these battles? When will I learn that he is in full control and just rest in that? I feel foolish, I feel dumb, I feel immature. And then I realize I am just human.
My only thought is that through these battles I will become stronger in my faith. My God supplies all of my needs. I trust yet I doubt, I know yet I forget, I try yet I still fail.
When I put my phone down, I felt relieved. After two hours of worrying, I finally had my answers, which meant I could continue with my training in a better frame of mind. The fears I’d been dragging around had been met with facts. With no uncertainty to play with, they began to disappear. I found out later on that it took my dad only about thirty minutes to do the inspection. He was able to go down, check everything, check it again, and then head back to the hotel. To this day, I’m not sure why it took him so long to get back to me—I think, since the news was good, he didn’t feel that rushed to tell me.
After all, there was nothing to worry about—for him!
For me, however, those two hours were agony. And yet God provided answers in the end. He took care of me, like he always does, and I knew that I would need to keep that truth in mind in order to complete the walk.
This lesson is true for many of us. We forget that our fear solves nothing. Matthew 6:27 asks, “Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?”
Our actions can change the outcome, but our fears cannot. There were still plenty of concerns—wires dripping with water, gases in the air, humidity in the air—but knowing that someone I trusted had checked things out gave me hope. I wouldn’t be able to breeze through the walk—I would still have to focus on each and every step to make my footing sure—but at least I had more information to help me go back to my training with increased confidence.
But still, as the day of the walk drew closer, my human nature wanted to drag my mind to dark places, and I struggled back and forth between feeling good and feeling worried.
I needed to get myself together. I needed more focus on heavenly wisdom.