Reckless FaithSample

I was coaching a small group as we did a team-building ropes course, and everyone was frustrated. “Keep going, everyone!” I cheered half-heartedly. I believed our other staff member when he said it was possible to solve, but my patience had worn out along with my bug spray.

The goal was to have two people, connected by their hands, balancing on two separate thin wires about a foot off the ground. The two wires form a V. The two people must stay on the wires from the bottom point of the V until the top, but as the space between them grows, so does the challenge. At the end of the V, the space between the two players is about nine feet wide. Pair after pair attempted the challenge, but everyone failed.

“How’s it going?” Our guide, approached us. “Do you want to know the trick?”

I nodded.

“When you start at the point of the V, focus all your effort on keeping your partner up. Don’t think about your own balance or self-preservation. As you focus on his balance, and he simultaneously on yours, you find equilibrium.”

Sure enough, every pair who had previously failed succeeded without much struggle. It made for interesting conversation later: if we focused more on holding up our brothers and sisters and less on our own fears of falling (or who was looking at our fall), we would inevitably reach our goal with less effort.

How many more people (family members? friends?) could we keep up on the wire across from us if we thought more about them and less about us? We live in a world where we “unfollow” people, create distance in relationships that require too much work, or draw boundaries when we feel uncomfortable. And when people we care about step off to self-preserve, we find a new partner and move on, disgusted with the failure, either theirs (which is judgement) or ours (which is shame). Could we stop long enough to grab our friend’s, family member’s, or partner’s hand and help us both regain balance?
I have held the hands of friends, my mother, people older than me, younger than me, my color, not my color, my gender, not my gender. Nothing has made me confront my own sin and selfishness as much as living in this kind of community. Whoever is across from you in life, and however they cause you to come face-to-face with your desire to self-preserve over self-sacrifice, we have a choice: We can either embrace self-denial and grow or resist it and find ourselves falling over and over again.