From A Great Height

The other morning, I was sitting on a balcony 4 stories up and I had this strange longing to throw myself off of it. Now don't call the Crisis Hotline or my therapist. I don't have a death wish or a real plan to do myself in. I just have always had a fascination with heights. The strange thing is that I am also deathly afraid of them.

It is dreadful, but I cannot stop imagining myself leaping from one precipice to another, defying the laws of gravity. When I was a kid and I sat in big church with my parents, I used to imagine jumping to and from these giant light fixtures that hung from the ceiling of the sanctuary.

I wrote about free-fall in an earlier post and I am still fascinated. To leap from a balcony or a plane or another such height would be to be absolutely free and absolutely filled with fear in the same moment. It is this place where my fear and fantasy are joined at the core.

Time

Some things just take a long time. It takes a long time to smoke meat. It takes a long time to learn to play the guitar. It takes a long time to hone the craft of writing. It takes a long time to develop a healthy relationship. It takes a long time to journey to God. You cannot expect these things to just happen for you one day without some long, drawn out, repeated rehearsal.

But I expect these things to come to me naturally and easily. Like if I want to be a rock star, then I can just dream about being a rock star and one day I will wake up on a stage, wailing in front of thousands of people. Instead, if I want to be a rock star, I should probably pick up a guitar and pluck away a few hours a day, and take some singing lessons.

In the same way, I cannot expect to have a healthy view of and relationship with God if I spend only a few minutes with him a few times a month. It just doesn't work that way. But I can choose to spend some time.