I think I'm going to try something I've seen a few of my friends doing. I'm going to be talking about Not being afraid. But instead of putting everything I want to all into one blog. Which greatly limits the amount of stuff I can say in the post, I'm going to just put a situation, and then just say why we shouldn't be afraid. Easy enough right?
I'm just going to use this post to kind of continue the last one, because I got cut really short because of some things I had to do. No biggie.
Well, human nature just tells us to be afraid of challenges that we are bound to face whether we want to or not. They say that we shouldn't be confident in ourselves because we are very imperfect. We all know that we aren't perfect. There is something going wrong in all of us. Whether we realize it or not is the key. I know that I tend not to realize a lot of my mess ups, unless they are very obvious. In any sense, the way we all think we are programmed to be tells us that we should basically have little confidence. Since there are very few things you can do that you can really do by your self. The things you can get away with doing it yourself though, we are scared, because we're used to having someone to our lefts or rights to help us out.
This is not the way I think we need to handle things. Whatever we do, we need to go in not only with this sense of urgency, but a sense of confidence that no matter what happens, God will always be there with us.Colossians 3:23 says "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as if working for the Lord, and not for men." While it says nothing about being afraid in this one, it does say work at it with all your heart. If you're really giving something all of your heart when you do it, you must have at least a little bit of confidence that you can do it, and get it done right. So, I take away that when we are working with our hearts, nothing related to fear is going to come close to stopping us from being who we are.
I can't explain why people are always so afraid, myself included. I am pretty much a little scaredy cat when it comes to things I'm even a little bit unsure about. Whenever a challenge presents itself, I'll be one of the first people to go out and say I'm not afraid to do it, but then when I really see what the challenge is asking me to do, I'll start to second guess myself, and that's where we are going to make mistakes. When we start to second guess what we're doing we are that much more likely to mess up. One example of such an event happened last Summer, when a few of my friends and I went down to the Maury River in Goshen, Virginia.
We were body tubing down the Maury, and we came to this one part where there was enough water to swim freely. There were also 12-15 foot rocks that we could safely and easily jump off of, and do all this crazy stuff if we wanted to. This was very fun, because we stayed there for hours just being teenagers. Not worrying about life. Then comes the fun part of the story. Trust me, keep reading, this is where it gets interesting.
My friend, Zack found this place to where he thought you could easily jump to the water, and not get hurt. Thing was, it was 30 feet high! Think, we're about to double or more the rocks we were jumping off. Zack climbs up to that part, and then we all realize that if he doesn't push off hard enough....Well, let's just say he would be lucky if he ended off with broken legs, and a few bruises. Thank the Lord that Zack did have that kind of leg power and he landed very safely in the middle of the perfect spot. Whew. But wait, there's more.
My friend Jacob went up there too. Now he's not nearly as big as Zack height wise or weight-wise. But that's really what scared me. It was the fact that there was a kid who is about half the size of Zack about to jump 30 feet to either a fun time, or a one-way ticket to a Goshen Hospital. Thankfully, he also landed in what became known as the safety zone.
I then went up, because I thought, "Hey, this kid who is smaller than me did it, so why can't I?" Well, because I'm a gutless kid who is scared of heights.That would be the only thing that is going to kill me up there. I stood up, looking at the safety zone, and thinking of how a kid who jumps off his left foot is going to jump off this cliff where the right foot is better to push off of. It wasn't a fun time. I eventually said I'm keeping my pride, and my life on this one, and headed back down, but then waited. I was about to watch another
My good friend Eric comes up. He's going to, as Jacob and Zack had just done, and I'd failed to do, jump off this thing. Eric and I are basically the same build, he's just a bit taller, and stronger. I thought, "If I see Eric do this successfully, then I know I can do it." I then stood at the top angle looking down at one of my best friends falling 30 feet right into the safety zone. Thank God. I was scared every time one of them jumped. I didn't want to go to a funeral before Summer Camp. It didn't seem like a very good idea to me.
After I had seen Eric successfully land, I had enough of my being scared, so I swallowed my pride and got prepared to jump. Everyone's telling me to only do it if I feel 100% sure that I can land in the safety zone. To tell the truth, I was only about 70% sure that I wasn't about die. Even so, I was not about to leave that spot without the thrill of falling 30 feet into water. I finally decide, it's now or never. I start to rock forward and back, as if do build some momentum, because from a standing position, I can't really jump that far, and I knew if I couldn't do something to build up any momentum, then I would surely be 6 feet deep.
I rocked back and forth about 5 times, and then I took a strong rock back, and let my leg to the rest of the work. I was airborne. I fell about 10 feet before I thought I was done. I heard 3 people saying "Oh crap!", because they too thought it was the end of me. Well, I can say I got about as close as you can without doing it. I landed in the safety zone, but if it were drawn into a circle, I would be right on the edge of it. My feet hit the water, and because I was wearing shoes, I didn't go straight in, and fell backwards. My back scraped up against some rocks and I thought I had just been stabbed. I thought for sure that not landing straight on the rocks and slowly bleeding out was going to be a worse way than just straight crumbling right then and there.
Thank God I realized about 3 seconds later I wasn't hurt that bad. I had barely hit the rocks, and I was going to be 100% okay. Man, I was thinking, "Never again". It was still fun though. those 4 seconds or so that I was in the air was the best time. That's just because I love being in the air and I will do anything to get off the ground. I was a little scraped up, but nothing anybody couldn't handle.
This story gave me a brand new meaning to the term "Leap of Faith". I was thinking to myself that after doing that, no physical thing was ever going to scare me again. To this day, no physical thing has scared me. There are very many things outside of that that have, but the physical stuff is nothing to me, simply because I came within a foot of no longer being of this world.
This was the most scared that I have ever been in my life. There comes a time though where you have to say "I am not going to let fear paralyze me", and just do it! I wish I could be like this with every aspect of my life, but hey, there is still time for me to have another one of these experiences in another way that will make me not be afraid of something else.
Can't wait to see where this series goes.
I love you guys.
TJ
P.S. Don't jump off 30 foot cliffs if you're not 80% sure or more. It will be very helpful.
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