What The Ropes Taught Me

Dan and I have this thing about ropes challenge courses and zip lines. At first glance, you'd think it is so NOT us. We both hate exercise, don't spend as much time outdoors as we should, are unfortunately not that in shape (although we both would like that to change). Yet a few years ago Dan did a course up in New Hampshire and fell in love.

The first one I did was a pure zip line course, up in Charlemont, Mass. last September. It happened to be the day after Ethan was officially diagnosed, and you could say we were both in strange moods. I don't want to say I was in a haze of denial or shock, because I had known what was coming, with Ethan. But I was not myself on that gorgeously clear, bright day. Not myself except on the zip line, flying sometimes 600 feet through the air in the trees, from one platform to the next. In the air I forgot about the booklets at home that I'd just been handed, about the phone calls I needed to make.

The next month was our anniversary and we took on a ropes course up near Lake George. By the end of the day I was sweaty (despite the unseasonably chilly weather), sore, and even bloodied, but felt glorious. There was something about tackling a challenge. While I never made it to highest level course, and practically collapsed after the second-highest level one, I accomplished more than I thought I would. I became adept at hooking and unhooking myself, of attaching myself to the zip lines and letting myself fly. I stood precariously on platforms 50 feet off the ground and waveringly walked a tight rope type lines and wobbly roped bridges. At one point high off the ground I fell onto a very narrow track of two wires and panic started to set in. For a moment I thought they were going to have to come rescue me. "You're okay!" Dan kept encouraging. "Remember, you're hooked in. You can't really fall." I repeated those words over to myself as I struggled to regain my balance and figure out a way to maneuver myself to the next platform. I was shaken, yet exhilarated.

Last weekend we checked out another place just over the western Mass. and Connecticut border in New York. I felt my usual shakiness return -- mostly involving the fear of me doing something completely airheaded, like not hooking myself up correctly, and plunging to an untimely death. But once I got over that and regained my confidence, I was ready to tackle that thing. Every time I do one of these courses I look to the next level, or the level after that, and think about how incredibly impossible it seems. Yet when I turn my attention to the task in front of me, and then the next, and the next, by the time I get to that stage, it's not as bad as I thought. It may be brutal, but not impossible.

At one point we stood on a platform watching someone else on another course gain the confidence to jump onto a trapeze-like swing into a wide rope ladder that they had to grab onto after letting go of the trapeze. "It's all about the illusion of fear," I said to Dan. "That's what these places are all about. There's no real reason to be afraid, because you're always connected." Each person is latched in not once but twice to the wires and can't possibly plunge to the ground, but when you're looking at how far down it is or how difficult it is to balance, it's so easy to forget that.

While I sweat up in the trees on Saturday I realized how similar it was to my walk with God and my walk in life. I thought about how easy it is to become paralzyed by fear when we only look at our circumstances and forget that we have a God that won't ever let us fall. Even in death, he doesn't let us down. I thought about how often we look at obstacles and immediately deem them impossible, not realizing that if we just take one step at a time, no challenge is as daunting as it seems. God never asks us to travel from point A to Z, just A to B, then B to C. And so on. I saw that course as life...full of adventure, pain, stress...moments when we crawl and others where we soar with the wind, unencumbered. We come through changed, battered, weary. Yet when I challenge myself, when I face my fears on the course and do everything I can possibly do and attempt what I think I cannot, when I push myself to the limit and know I've tried my hardest, even if I didn't completely succeed...that is a life well lived. That is the best kind of adventure.