Category: Cliff Jumping

I don’t believe that God is sovereign.

There is strength within the sorrow;

there is beauty in our tears.

And You meet us in our mourning,

with a love that casts out fear.

And You are working in our waiting,

You’re sanctifying us.

When beyond our understanding,

You’re teaching us to trust.

Your plans are still to prosper; You have not forgotten us.

You’re with us in the fire and the flood.

You are faithful forever–perfect in love,

You are sovereign over us.

If you can tell me you honestly believe every word in that song every minute of every day and you’ve never doubted it I’ll give you $100 right now.

Seriously. You tell me right now that this hasn’t been a question for you ever and I will drop everything and give you a crisp one-hundred dollar bill.

If it were the other way around and you were offering me that cash, I wouldn’t get it. I’d have to be straight up with you and say I doubt that. I doubt it every day. I mean, if we’re going to be 100% honest I can’t tell you I believe that God really is sovereign often enough for it to make a difference for me, and I doubt you’re much different.

I mean, think about it–I fall off a cliff and I look at my life post-accident and I find myself wheelchair-bound and hopping around with a walker to the point that going about 200 yards knocks me out and makes me stop to catch my breath every ten steps. What would that do to you when you’ve spent the last 20 years of your life more active than half the people you knew? I ran track for almost ten years, played basketball, football, ran cross-country, spent my college years in the gym and running and working on my feet for sometimes 12 hours straight, and now all I do is sit at home and watch The Walking Dead and The Office while my dog tries to lay on my lap and I keep having to kick her off.

Even worse, I’m a people person. I spent my days interacting with dozens, if not hundreds of people. You know who I see now? Pretty much just my mom, dad, and sisters with a few friends sprinkled in every now and then. And while I love my family to death and would spend the rest of my life with only them if I needed to without question, it’s not what my life was before.

And to top it all off, I spent the summer of 2015 discovering that Jesus has given me a passion to serve Him and also kids at my single favorite place on earth–Sky Ranch. But now, there’s a solid chance I won’t get to do that again this year. I’ve already had to drop out of school for the semester. Will I have to drop camp, too?

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A quick shot from one of our community nights last summer.

Honestly, I think I’d feel better if I had a solid answer–a yes or a no, not a maybe. But I don’t. I have a nice, strong, brutish maybe. I can start bearing weight on my foot the week staff training starts, and some people with my injury haven’t had required therapy. So since I have no idea if I’ll actually need therapy or not, and won’t know until my eight weeks of non-weight-bearing are up, I’m kind of freaking out here.

I want to know. I want answers. I want the security that comes with having enough information to make a plan.

I hate not having a plan.

“Lean on Jesus and trust Him to take care of it all in His timing–that can be your plan,” you might say. But I have a serious problem with that. Not that I disagree, but that I have serious trouble actually buying in to that. I lay awake at night wondering what it’ll feel like in May thinking about how surely I knew that Jesus was sending me to camp for the summer, but instead I’m 627 miles away sitting on the couch watching Netflix all day. I have actually lost more hours of sleep over this than I’d like to admit.

I really suck at believing that God is sovereign.

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I want this recovery process to be over and to be back on my feet. I want to go to camp and love Jesus in a way kids can’t ignore, get to know them and my co-staff and make lifelong friends. I want to meet Jesus through those people, and through the quiet, calm serenity of camp. I want to get sweet tan lines from my  tanks and my Chacos. I want to go to camp.

But what if I don’t?

What will happen in May if I don’t go to camp?

How will I feel?

You know what the answer is to all of those questions? It doesn’t stinking matter.

Jesus said something pretty profound in Matthew 6:34–

Therefore don’t worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Dang right it does. Today sucks.

Which is exactly what He wants me, and you, to get a grip on. In my case, stop worrying about May. Stop worrying about camp. Just completely forget about your tan lines. Focus on today. What do you need to do today?

I need to talk to Jesus, learn His word, and see where He wants me to go today. And where He wants me to go is where I already am–living where He’s put me and acting like His sacrifice on the cross and His resurrection we just celebrated last weekend actually means something to me. It means everything, and I need to show it.

Here’s another song I need to start playing until I can’t get it out of my head:

I don’t know about tomorrow–
I just live from day to day.
I don’t borrow from it’s sunshine,
for it’s skies may turn to gray
I don’t worry o’er my future,
for I know what Jesus said!
And today He walks beside me
For He knows what lies ahead.
Many things about tomorrow
I don’t seem to understand.
But I know Who holds tomorrow
and I know Who holds my hand.

I am not a praying man.

“What’s it gonna take to get you to talk to Me?”

Apparently for me, the answer to that question is “Man, I really don’t know. Seems like even falling to my death off a cliff isn’t enough.”

Which is really sick and twisted, isn’t it?

It takes some time seeing reason in an accident like mine. Honestly, from the outside in, it looks like a massive, bone-headed stupid mistake, and on my part, it really was. We were on that hiking trip to see the crag at the end of the trail, but I took a detour, made a brash, quick decision to inspect a waterfall halfway up the trail, and ended up at the bottom of a cliff with a shattered foot, elbow, and a face covered in blood. Needless to say, we never made it to the crag.

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This is the cliff we were headed to, not the one I fell from.

And I feel like a complete moron, not only because I made that idiotic decision to inspect that cliff, but largely because literally thousands of people have been praying for me in this, for survival on the day of the accident, for healing since, and I can count the times I’ve talked to Jesus in this whole thing on one hand.

What a joke, right?

I wrote a whole blog post about how it happened; how I was ready to go because on the way down I saw no other options for me getting off that mountain than in a body bag, and I figured, “If this is it, Jesus, I guess this is it. Take me home.” And it inspired a lot of people and everybody applauded me. But honestly, since then, I don’t know how many times I’ve actually spent talking to Jesus about this, about life, about Him, but I do know it’s less than five, and for that I am utterly ashamed.

So here I am, lying in bed in my grandparents’ house in Dallas, and I hear Him whisper,

“What’s it gonna take to get you to talk to Me, dude? You should’ve died on that mountain and I got you out of there. You talk about peace, and how you want to find My will in this but then you go trying to find that peace in all the wrong places—timing, lust, logic, even sleep—but you’re so wrong, brother. You’re not going to find peace there no matter how hard you try to make it fit. There’s only one way, and you know it.”

So I’m beating myself up because I know. I know exactly what that one way is, but I’ve ignored it for almost a month. I need to just talk to You. I need to just talk with You.

What I need to do is to pray.

I heard one pastor say that prayer doesn’t do anything. We put so much hope in prayer itself like the praying is gonna make anything happen through its own power. The real power is in Jesus and how He chooses to act.

Well, duh.

But that doesn’t mean that this open line of communication, this connection to the Maker of the Stars is useless. It’s not pointless. He uses it to soothe my heart. He inhabits it to show me His presence in my life in a way unlike any other. Prayer is not me falling to my knees and pleading with teary eyes that He heals me tomorrow, then walking away wondering if He’ll really do it—it’s dialogue. Sometimes it’s just listening to Him. It’s two-way communication, and as a talker, that’s something I need desperately.

So I guess I have to make a choice tonight, and then again tomorrow, and later on tomorrow again, then again, and then the next day, to keep that line of communication open. It’s not a one-time switch-flip that provides a constant dialogue (although I can have that dialogue with Him all day if I really want to). It’s recurring. It’s constantly happening again and again, not constantly happening without interruption.

God help me if I don’t take advantage of this opportunity to keep breathing–if I take it for granted. I sure as heck know I didn’t get here because of my superior knowledge or skills. I’m still here because He wants me to be. So I’d better start talking and see what needs to be done.

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I fell on the Rock, and He broke me to pieces.

What goes through your mind when your foot slips on wet rock and sends you flying through the air off a 30-foot cliff? Surprisingly, a lot.

I never thought that would be a sentence I could write in retrospect of my own life but I can. A week ago it would’ve been a sentence of fiction. Today, it’s an autobiography. A week ago, I slipped and fell 30 feet and honestly should not be here right now to write this story. But I’m here, and I remember a lot.

So what does go through your mind while you fall to the bottom of a waterfall with more fall than water? The exact opposite of what I just told you.

The whole thing maybe took half a second, but being the over-expander that I am, my mind naturally shoved as many words into my brain in that half second as it could, but none of them made me think like what I wrote above. My first thought was that it wasn’t even real–a phenomenon my mind judged to be its way of warning me what would happen if I weren’t more careful. But my mind was wrong. It wasn’t warning me of anything potential–it was processing something that was actually happening.

So my next thought was, “Holy crap, I really am falling.” Naturally, I’m a fixer. When there’s a problem, I look immediately for what I can do to fix it. But I couldn’t find anything. I was going to hit the bottom, and judging from the distance I’d spent about 5 minutes inspecting beforehand, I was going to die.

This is the part where most people’s stories would start changing directions. Some would scream. Some would panic. Some would call on their deity to save them and let them survive. But my reaction was unnatural even to me.

Scary things do a number on me. The very preview for Insidious 2 put me on the floor of the theater shaking like a leaf, and it was laughable. So, you know, you’d think the thought of dying would make me scream like a Roman Candle.

But I was peaceful.

“Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 4:7 NLT)

You don’t know how much it exceeds what you can understand until panic is the only thing that makes sense.

I can’t explain it. It flooded me. It comforted me, it took me to the ground just letting Him hold me and carry me all the way home.

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And then I woke up. Except I was still at the bottom of that waterfall, on a rock, broken to pieces but breathing. Drenched in my own blood but crying out with a strength that didn’t make sense. I should’ve woken up with Him and my grandma and great grandma and my loved ones who’d already done the same surrounding me but I was surrounded by living friends, and strangers whose hearts were so huge and so beautiful that I could see them even though my mind was loopy and my short-term memory sucked. Thirty of them, volunteers who didn’t have to be there, surrounded me, got me on a stretcher, made me so comfortable, and carried me two and a half miles off that mountainside in Northwest Arkansas like I was their own son, or brother. Then they loaded me into a helicopter, and I had time to sleep.

Except I didn’t sleep. My mind just wouldn’t stop thinking. All I could focus on was that crazy peace. I was ready to go. Not that I wanted to, but that I saw no other option, and I was okay with the one that I saw. Jesus held me, all the way down.

You might be raising your hands, saying, “Wow, another Jesus story. Big deal. Miracles like that happen, it wouldn’t be the first time.” To which I would say, “Yeah, you’re right–they do.” But honestly, my own faith, though a part of my life for pretty much ever, wasn’t much of anything before that fall.

I let my life take over. Crazy schedules and workaholic-ness dominated my time. I was secretly addicted to pornography and didn’t want anyone to know. I spent no time with Jesus on my own outside of church services and the occasional sermon podcast. I wasn’t giving Him my whole heart the way I said I had, so this fall and my reaction therein didn’t have anything to do with my own faith being strong or anything like that. It sucked.

I had peace because He gave it to me.

And I learned something huge at the bottom of that waterfall:

“Whoever falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; but on whoever it falls, it will grind him to powder.” (Matthew 21:44 HCSB)

Jesus used that fall to break me, literally, emotionally, spiritually, mentally, whatever–He literally used that cliff to make this verse come to life in my story, and I’ve got months ahead to see what that looks like.

For now, it means resting in Him–remembering His grace and goodness, His sovereignty, His blessing, and His beauty. It means thanking Him night and day for not only sparing me on that mountain but surrounding me by such incredible, beautiful, people. It means remembering every single day that no matter how much just sitting on the couch watching Friends and House of Cards can eventually suck, I’m alive, and I’m going to walk on my own again. I’m going to get use of my arm back, and I’m going to recover 100%. None of that should be what I’m typing but it is, and He is merciful.

So falling off a 30-foot cliff can teach you a lot. Mainly, how small you are. I’d do wrong if I didn’t listen to it.