Just Jump Already
Yes, I know the chasm at which you stand.
But I know now it’s really not that big a deal. You just jump, the bridge appears. No thinking, no plotting, just jumping out of a heart desirous to love. Sure, it seems scary where you are, like a leap out of an airplane with only the promise of a parachute being provided on the way down. But the metaphor’s all wrong, an illusion intended to paralyze you with fear. Faith’s really just a child’s joyous jump from off the side of the pool into eager parental arms longing to cuddle their little one like they did when they gathered their beloved toddler from the bath in a warm towel of satisfied delight. It’s uncomfortable and cold where you stand as if your were on the edge of Niagara Falls naked, clutching a barrel, trying to decide for death while praying for a Deus ex helicopter ending. Jesus isn’t going to marshall in to rescue you there because this is not his scene, running around rescuing people at their commanding pout that God just act the genie part we wrote in our scripts so that we could be supported in our Messiah roles. I don’t care what Augustine or Kierkegaard said. You all need a point of view shift. It’s not about the anxious leap, the focus on what we have to give up in order to muster up the courage to leap into an abyss of fear. You should be scared to death of that because it’s not an accurate view and a running-away-from that is not faith. Our Shepherd God leads, encourages, guides. He doesn’t drive us like lemmings to our death. Instead, Jesus just stands in the pool waiting for us to jump or slowly descend the stairs or whatever feels right for us, and he holds out his hand to receive us and hold us secure. Yes, there is a gap, but more like that of Michelangelo’s beneficent hand reaching toward straining hand in Creation’s space, not a yawning abyss we must somehow traverse as paraplegic souls. Besides, the abyss is what you’re running from, not leaping over or into, and the abyss cannot be escaped, for we carry it with us; it is us. We can only bring it into the luminosity of love in a splash of Glory’s delight that waits to engulf our abyssmal beloved selves and illumine our destructive lies that drive us to the despair of paralyzed fear. © 2004 Tess Lockhart. All rights reserved. |