Feelings Need to be the Caboose of Life, Not the Engine – Part 2

18 Apr Feelings Need to be the Caboose of Life, Not the Engine – Part 2

Walking off a cliff backwards can teach you a lot about yourself

To be honest, the first time, I didn’t actually walk; it was more like a crawl… a shinny, actually. I was teaching at a college in Phoenix, Arizona, and one day several of my students approached me. “Mr. Anders,” they said, “we are going up on Squaw Peak to do a little rappelling off some of the cliffs on Saturday. Would you like to go?”

It was hard for me to say no. For one thing, I didn’t want to appear chicken. Then, never having been rappelling before, I didn’t understand how truly terrifying it would be. So, stifling every instinct to the contrary, I nonchalantly said, “Sure.”

When we got to the mountain the next Saturday, I’ll never forget walking over to the edge of a cliff and looking down for the first time — the cliff was the height of a ten-story building!

They explained to me that the rope, which was the diameter of my thumb, was rated to hold 1200 pounds.

Uh-huh.

So they clipped me into a webbed diaper-like contraption made out of seat belt material, threaded the rope through a big paper clip attached to my diaper and said, “Just lean back against the rope, and walk backward off the cliff.”

Right!

I didn’t trust the rope. As a kid back in Indiana, we used to swing on ropes in the barn that were as big around as my wrist. Those would hold a guy. This little thing might hold – it might not. And the big paper clip (carabiner) that held me in my seat belt diaper and attached me to the rope — well, it didn’t look strong enough to hold a Thanksgiving turkey! I didn’t have faith in my equipment, and I was terrified.

But there I was. Halfway over the edge. Too proud to climb back up; too scared to lean back and walk down. So I began to sort of shinny down, holding the rope so tightly that I didn’t even need any other equipment. With my legs wrapped around the rope, hunched over in a modified fetal position, I squirmed down over the edge. Not a pretty sight.

Before I had gotten a third of the way down, my arms were trembling and almost useless. My kneecaps were sore from bumping against the face of the cliff, my hands and elbows were bruised and aching. I hung there, swinging gently like a ham in a smokehouse, lips and cheek pressed against the face of the cliff, wondering if I would ever see another sunrise.

With infinite patience, the leader of the group yelled down, “Lean back, Mr. Anders.”

In utter contradiction to reality, I yelled up, “I am leaning back!”

Finally, with exhaustion diminishing my will to live, I concluded that I would never get out of there alive anyway if I didn’t do something, so I did what he said. I leaned back against the rope until my feet were flat against the face of the cliff. Then I let the rope slip through the carabiner, and… I scaled effortlessly down the face of the cliff!

Once down, I rushed back up to go again.

What I learned that day was that when rappelling, you have to trust your rope. You have to believe that it will hold you and act accordingly. If you trust in your own strength to get you down, it will sap every ounce of energy before you even get close to the ground, and leave you hanging helplessly in space.

When it comes to the spiritual life, we are like rappellers. The cliff is life. The rope is God. If we try to make it over the cliff in our own strength and enough things go wrong (and they will), it will sap the life out of us. But if we lean back on the rope, believing that God will hold us, we make it down the cliff of life.

The will of God can be frightening

There are times when emotions tell you to do something and you shouldn’t. We looked at that last week.  Leading with our emotions through the maze of life can lead us to predictable bad decisions.

But there are other times your emotions will tell you not to do something and you should. That’s what we want to look at this week.

There are times when the will of God can seem as terrifying as walking over to a cliff and looking down. Every instinct in you screams to back up and walk away.

Take Jesus as an example. On the night in which He was to be betrayed by Judas, He went to the Garden of Gethsemane with His disciples to pray and prepare for the unspeakable horror of the coming hours, when He would suffer and die. In spite of the fact that He was God and knew He would be resurrected, He was, nevertheless, still also a man and the terror of the coming events overwhelmed Him.

Jesus said to His disciples, “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death” (Matt. 26:38). He had done nothing wrong, yet He was engulfed in grief. The will of God was terrifying.

Yet, Jesus trusted His Heavenly Father. Because He trusted Him, He obeyed Him.  And though it was unimaginably difficult, God’s grace sustained Him, and in the end all was well.

We live in a fallen world, and even when we believe the right things and make good decisions, we are not exempt from the possibility of great emotional upheaval. Living in fellowship and obedience to God doesn’t always lessen the pain we go through. But it makes it possible to bear.

Sometimes God’s will asks us to make a decision that is frightening. If we have wronged someone, the will of God may require us to go back to that person, ask for forgiveness and possibly offer restitution. That can be very scary, yet it is clear that God is asking us to do it. So, we make a difficult decision and, trusting God, we obey.

It may be that our vocation requires us to do things that violate our standards as a believer and God may ask us to change vocations. The uncertainty, perhaps the reality, that it will result in our making less money, can be deeply unnerving. Yet God is asking it of us. So, we are to make the difficult decision to trust God and obey.

Or, it may not be a decision that God asks us to make, to do or not do something, but a circumstance that comes upon us. We lose our job. We learn that we have a serious illness. Someone we deeply love dies. Circumstances, that God has allowed, are suddenly terrifying.

Through it all, our model is Jesus. In addition to the example of Gethsemane we looked at earlier, listen to Hebrews 12:1-3:

“Let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.

During the times of life when God’s will is as terrifying as looking down a cliff, we choose to follow the truth rather than our emotions.  At those times, we need to take stock of reality:

• God is all good and all powerful
• God loves us
• God’s will is best for us
• God will never lead us where His grace cannot sustain us
• Every loss we accept on earth is disproportionately rewarded in heaven
• In the end, all will be well.

Said more succinctly, the Rope will hold us.

So we choose to “go over the cliff” regardless of what our emotions are telling us, believing that the Rope will hold us.

Emotions must be kept in check if we are to make good decisions

Whether it is our emotions telling us to do something we ought not, or telling us not to do something we ought, emotions must be kept in check if we are to make good decisions.

I remember the time I wanted some bongo drums. I was walking past a music store with my mother and brother and saw a pair of bongo drums in the window, and something deep within me cried out to own those drums. My desire grew like a fire in a dry house, and before long, my whole life was consumed with getting those drums. I was about thirteen or fourteen years old and had worked at odd jobs long enough to be able to plunk down the rather sizable sum of thirty dollars for them.

Almost the instant I bought them, I knew I had made a mistake. What can you do with bongo drums? I didn’t play with a calypso band. I didn’t play with any band. I took the drums home and by the time I had whacked around on them for thirty minutes, I had exhausted what you can do alone with bongo drums. I put them down and stared at them. Resentment started to build. I began to visualize all the other things I could have bought with that money that would have been fun for a long time. The drums sat around our house un-played for the next ten years until the drum heads split from old age and my mother got rid of them.

That was a painful but profitable lesson, and it has saved me from many subsequent bad decisions. Whenever I feel an irrational desire for something rise up and grab me by the throat, I can scoff at the desire and say, “You’re nothing but a set of bongo drums in disguise.”

Make no mistake, it’s hard to make the right decisions when we’re emotionally involved. But the question is, how much do we want to suffer? Would we rather experience the short-term pain of right decisions, or the long-term pain of wrong decisions? Less pain comes from right decisions.

God has put faith at the center of the Christian life in three steps:

1. Reveal truth: God revealed His truth to humanity. In the earliest days, He did this directly through prophets, dreams, visions, or direct contact. However, He also oversaw the writing down of His revelation so that His primary means of revelation today is the Bible (Hebrews 4:12).
2. Require faith: Many of the things that God asks of us in His revelation take us 180 degrees in the opposite direction of our natural inclinations. Therefore, we will only respond appropriately if we believe God and trust His word. When we trust we obey (John 14:15). When we do not obey, it is because we do not trust.
3. Reward Obedience: We reap the consequences of our faith. If we follow God in faithful and trusting obedience, God rewards us (Psalm 19:11). If we do not, He chastens us (Hebrews 12:4-11). His desire is to nurture our faith by rewarding us for obedience, strengthening our faith and increasing our readiness to obey.

Conclusion

We see, that not feelings but faith, based on facts, is the heart of the Christian life. All God wants from us is to believe in Him and trust Him, demonstrated by doing as He says.

• “Without faith, it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him” (Hebrews 11:6).
• “The righteous shall live by faith” (Romans 1:17).
• “We walk by faith and not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7).

So, just as a rappeller must trust the rope, the Christian must trust God, trust His Word, believing that as we do, God will demonstrate His truth to be reliable.

Next week will be the last post in our Helpful Tips for Saving Yourself from Trouble series, finishing with some summary thoughts from a “satellite view.” I’ll see you then!

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