Day 46 - July 31 - You want me to do WHAT?

I wanted to tell you about something from my past that's been rattling around my brain for a few days, and which some texts from my friend and pastor yesterday cemented as something I needed to post. Roll back about 15 years to an early January morning at the Pinnacles National Monument. After weeks of study, practice and training on technique, method, and phraseology, and after an hour and a half hike 1200 feet up the side of a mountain, two good friends and I were standing at the base of a rock feature called Bynum's Spire - 45 feet of rock with near vertical sides. One of my friends was a long-time rock climber, and he was ready to take me and my other friend up our first real rock climb.

I took my first look at this rock I was supposed to climb, and my first thought was "that's not climbable". Turns out, it is, and is actually a pretty easy climb, now that I've got numerous harder climbs under my belt. But at that moment, I didn't think anyone could climb it, much less me. But, we roped up, and in a matter of 45 minutes or so, the three of us were standing on the top of a 45-foot-tall spire, with a top about five feet across. Yes, it was significantly cool! Only one problem - now it was time to go down!

To get down, we had to rappell. The way you do that is, you anchor the rope to the rock, put the rope through a rappell device attached to your climbing harness, grab the rope in the correct method, and lean back to let the rope take the strain. That was really easy to do when the rope was tied to a doorknob in my living room, and I was standing on level ground. But when you are standing on a pointy rock with a rope anchored in front of your feet, and nothing behind you but 45 feet of empty air between you and the very hard ground, leaning backwards is not exactly intuitive. In fact, it was just about the most difficult thing I'd faced to that point in my life. You want me to do WHAT? Lean back? Yeah, I know we talked about this before, but still! It doesn't help that rope, which is about six tenths of an inch thick, somehow magically gets skinnier the higher up in the air you are!

So, here I am - trying to stand upright on a nearly vertical rock wall instead of leaning backwards onto the rope. The only problem with my reasoning was that you can't stand on a nearly vertical rock wall. What I knew in my head (from studying the books) was that if I leaned back, my body, the rope, and the rock wall would all make a nice, stable triangle, and I would be very secure in that position. If I tried to stand upright, though, my feet would inevitably slide out from under me and I would bang myself against the rock, dangling at the end of the rope like a hooked fish (and just as elegantly, I might add). Fortunately, I had someone who had done this before with me, and he ably talked me into doing what the book told me I had to do in order to rappell safely - lean back and trust the rope. Yes, it looked microscopic. Yes, I was a loooooong way from the ground. Yes, if it didn't work I was dead. But I still had to lean back and trust the rope.

I learned a number of good lessons that day, and I'm sure you've picked up on the amazing number of parallels between rock climbing and following Christ. One of my most significant lessons from that day, I think, is the fact that studying the Book and applying it are two very different matters, and it doesn't really begin to sink in until you've gotten to do it.

Since I'm sitting in Fresno typing this, it's pretty obvious that I finally got rappelling right and made it down. I was so pumped full of adrenaline, we immediately headed to over to other rocks to do it again, and I've gotten pretty good at rappelling over the years. But every single time I rappell, I still have to work past that mental hurdle again about doing something so counter-intuitive as to lean away into open space and trust the rope, because even after all these years, it doesn't fit with what my mind says I should do.

This is what I do in Fresno each day - work past all the things everybody (including my own mind) thinks I should do and lean back onto the Rope that is Christ. Sometime it's hard to believe He can hold our weight; sometime I'm so focused on the potential fall that I forget I'm tied to the Rock; and sometime I don't want to go down - I'd rather just stop rappelling forever and stay right where I'm at. But that won't get me to where I'm going - I'm called to trust that the Rope will hold me, that It will not fail, and that I will be delivered safely to the ground below once I reach the end of the rappell.

But it's hard to relax and lean back when the adrenaline keeps pumping so hard!

I'm still waiting to hear about the boy this morning - Cherié and Joélle are with him now. I'm taking the "no phone calls in the middle of the night" to mean he rested well enough. I'll post more once we know it.

Thank you for your continued prayers and words of encouragement. You lift us up with all your faithful support!