Shaver's Razor

Recently, I took our middle schoolers at Smyrna Assembly on a Fall Retreat to New Frontiers camp in Smithville, TN. During the retreat, New Frontiers scheduled for our group to participate in their high-ropes course -a forty foot tower of ropes, cables, and lumber. This ropes course challenged you to move upwards, crossways, sideways, and any other ways toward the top of the tower where you could return to the ground only by zipline stretched across a 200 yard wide chasam!

The ropes course challenged these middle schoolers physically, mentally, and emotionally as each and everyone of them made it , one by one, through the ropes course tower. On average each person took 20 minutes to reach the top of the tower before they could zipline back down. They had a reason to be pround when they made it back to their friends on the ground.

When we came away from it and began the trek back to camp for lunch, I overheard the teens relating their own experiences with each other.  I heard teens say that when they started, on the ground, the tower didn’t appear that difficult or frightening. But they all agreed when they began to move little more than halfway up, they suddenly became scared of hights, they questioned the safety of the equippment, and doubted if they were even strong enough to climb through the rest of the ropes course.  Though they were harnessed in and completely safe, doubt began to overtake them as they climbed higher and the challenge became more real (to be honest, my legs got a little shaky too).

I heard each of the teens relate how, during the climb, they once thought their harness and safety grips were going to slow them down.  But as they climbed higher, they realized that their harness anchored them and allowed them to stop relying soley on their own strength to make the climb. If they placed less trust in themselves and more trust in the harness they could go anywhere on the course.

Hmmm. How might that apply to their lives in Christ Jesus? How does their experience on the ropes course relate to my walk with my God?

We can, each one of us, move about through life if the full expression of our own strength and our own limitations. But it is merely our own strength …and that will only take us so far. God’s will may have once seemed a hinderance to MY plans or my career or my finances. But when I am harnessed to Him, I discover that my plans can’t be completed by my strength …I need to trust in His strength because the journey He has for me is much higher and more challenging then I first perceived it to be.

Are you ready to climb the ropes course in your journey?