The Wild Blue Yonder

My feet had fallen asleep due to the awkward, cramped position. I was 10,000 feet in the air - strapped tightly to a virtual stranger. My adrenaline was pumping. My heart was racing. And that was before the airplane door even flew open. The fear probably would have paralyzed me if I wasn't too frightened to realize that I ought to be scared! And with one simple roll to the right, we were plummeting towards the earth.

The wind rushed by. The clouds swirled around us. We flipped, rolled and spun as we hurtled through the sky. The ice crystals in the clouds ripped away at my face. I could barely hear my instructor above the roar of our descent, "Arch! Arch!"

I thrust my arms and legs out and arched my back just like I had been trained. We stopped flipping end-over-end and leveled out. Our freefall slowed to a mere 120 mph as we broke through the clouds. There was no sense of falling, just a steady rush of wind as the ground moved closer and closer. My instructor yanked the cord and our chute deployed. We suddenly jerked to a slow drift and found ourselves in an immediate, peaceful silence. We floated there in the beautiful stillness between the earth and the clouds.

Some people have called me crazy for jumping out of a perfectly good plane. Others have expressed a deep-seated fear that would hinder them from ever skydiving themselves. Even though I was scared at the time, my determination and desire to go through with the jump were even greater than the fear.

God often calls us to do crazy things that bring us face-to-face with our fears. He may call us to take on a new ministry role. He may nudge us to share His good news with a complete stranger. (Or maybe even scarier - our closest friend...) He may even call us to go against the grain, to fight for a deeper sense of right, irregardless of what all others think. These are definitely scary challenges to take on.

"You're afraid? So what! Everybody's afraid. Fear is the common ground of humanity. The question you must wrestle to the ground is 'Will I allow my fear to bind me to mediocrity.'" Andy Stanley, The Next Generation Leader

We can all look back on times in our lives when we let fear keep us from jumping out of the plane, trying something new or speaking up when we knew we should. Hopefully, we can also remember even more times when we wrestled that fear to the ground and let God use us inspite of our fright.

"...so I will save you, and you will be a blessing. Do not be afraid, but let your hands be strong." Zechariah 8:13 (NIV)

It may seem a lot safer to sit on the ground and watch the chutes of others flare open above you. But the ground is where the dirty fog of mediocrity settles in. At some point very early in my Christian walk, God moved me to quit watching and start jumping. Has it been scary? You better believe it! At times it has even been almost-pee-in-your-pants scary! Yet still, I have found that it is far better to strive for a trust in God's faithfulness than to suffer the regret of staying on the ground when I knew I should have jumped.

The challenge that God places before us is to strap in, push through the fear and lunge out into the wild blue yonder. And if the chute doesn't open and you hit the ground - oh well! At least you went out with a bang instead of slowly choking to death on that dirty fog of mediocrity. The chances are in your favor that God's faithfulness will flare open like the millions of times before. And when it does, you'll get to experience that beautiful stillness that's only found in the wild blue yonder.