Navigating Through Life’s Transitions

 

There’s a light-hearted (and thoroughly apocryphal!) story about a man out hunting in rugged countryside. As he pushes his way through deep undergrowth he stumbles and suddenly, to his horror, finds himself slipping over a bluff. His rifle flies in one direction, his pack in another, and he goes straight down. In desperation he manages to grab hold of a tree branch growing out of the side of the cliff. There he is, dangling precariously over a hundred-metre drop onto jagged rocks.

He looks up and realizes he can never make it back to the top. There’s nothing to grip onto and the cliff face is crumbling and unstable.

He looks down and nearly passes out with fright. He could never survive the fall.

In panic he calls out, “Help, help! Is anybody there?” It’s an instinctive reaction. He knows he’s far from any human assistance.

Not surprisingly, then, he nearly falls off the branch when a voice from above booms back, “I’m here. What do you want?”

The man can’t figure out where exactly the voice is coming from but he hasn’t got time to worry about that. Instead he yells back, “I need help. I’m about to fall and I’m stuck. Please, please help get me back up.”

The voice from above is warm and sympathetic. “Don’t panic, lad. I’ll get you to safety. But you must do one thing in order for that to happen.”

“Anything, I’ll do anything. Just get me back up. What do I need to do?”

Five short words come from the voice above. “Let go of the branch.”

There’s a stunned silence. Despite his desperation it is clear that the man on the branch is taking time to weigh up his options – and the consequences they present.

Finally he calls out again. “Is there anybody else up there?”

Life is a series of crises

All of us face crises in our lives. Some crises are self-imposed because of our foolishness. Others come because of circumstances dropped on us. Still others are a natural result of our growth from one stage of maturity to another.

And, like the man in the story, in a crisis we are desperate for help. Not that we necessarily want the solutions God may offer! Yet one thing is constantly true. It’s a general rule that when we are at a point of great uncertainty we are open to God in a much more real way than we are in settled times when things are going smoothly.

Finding ourselves in a desperate situation causes us to reach out to God. Our prayer moves from being a ritual to a necessity. No wonder Jesus was able to say, “You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope.” Why blessed? The second part of the verse makes it clear. “With less of you there is more of God and his rule.” (Matthew 5:3, The Message).

We constantly forget what God is really like. We need reminders. Sometimes only by upsetting the applecart and turning our lives upside down can God make us re-evaluate what we have come to assume and accept – about ourselves, about others, about our role in God’s world. The crisis gives us the opportunity to trust God more fully, and to move in new directions.