Ok, so there's that moment right before you do what you know you shouldn't, the moment where you are aware that what you are about to do is wrong, it goes against what you believe to be good, but you want to do it anyway. That moment can last anywhere from half a second to 2 hours to days even, but most of the time it's about 10 minutes or less. You think about it for 10 minutes, the choice before you, even though in that moment it feels nothing like a choice, but more like a must. Moreover, these 10 minutes didn't just creep up out of nowhere, they were tugged at by previous thoughts you had entertained, a sort of premeditation on what you knew you shouldn't do...until the moment is upon you and now you are right at the cliff of trusting in God to bring about those eagle's wings. You want so badly to jump, to let go of the strong "need" for sin and just jump off and let Him catch you and take you to the next mountain, but another part of you is so scared you nearly have a heart attack. You think that if you jump He won't catch you, you begin to bring human logic into the picture, thinking that if you jump you would splat yourself dead over some sharp rocks, and you exclude the Almighty God altogether. You don't recall that God went against gravity and split the ocean in half, or that He went against mathematics and passed out more than 5000 loaves of bread from a basket of 5 loaves, or that he ...you know...went against death and resurrected after being dead for 3 days. No, that doesn't come to mind when I'm at that moment of standing at the edge of the cliff of trust. All I seem to recall is the fear in me, that if I jump nothing will save me, but the strange thing is that if i stay on this cliff I'll definitely die. If I don't die of old age, I'll surely die of something else, but death will eventually come, and I will have never tasted the adventure of flying and exploring the other mountains. All because I didn't jump.
Jumping can look like different decisions for different people. Jumping can be as extreme as selling your house, packing up and just relocating you and your family to some foreign third world country, where you live in huts and poop in dirt holes. But for most of us, jumping looks more like writing that check for 10% of your paycheck and giving that to the church, or saying yes (or no) to the person who asked you to marry them, or turning your car around from entering that place where you know you'll regret going later, or maybe it's not eating something, maybe it's eating something, it could be anything, because sin takes on multiple forms. We each face sin on a daily basis, but there's that moment, the 10 minutes of inching toward the cliff's end, of letting go of fear or worry or doubt or even logic itself, to jump screaming/trembling/crying into what you don't fully understand; the deep power of Jesus's love.
J.
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