Trust Fall

Did you ever do this as a kid - post someone in a spot behind you that you think you can trust, cross your arms over your chest, and free-fall backward placing all of your hope (and pride) in their ability to catch you? Probably not the smartest game we played as kids (I’m sure it was right up there with Red Rover), but I did it and my true friends were loyal. One particular person was not so trustworthy, though, and thought it was funny to let me fall on the playground pavement right in front of my peers. This marked the end of my childhood trust-falling days. I’m not sure what was more bruised, my ego or my tailbone. It didn’t matter, I wasn’t going to get hurt like that again and I was instantly guarded against that situation.

This seemingly silly game is symbolic of similar experiences I’ve had in my adult life as well. I’ve put it all on the line believing that someone is going to come through for me and then they don’t. I again become guarded with only my inner circle of a select few as the exception. I hold these precious people close and try to catch them as consistently as they catch me. And it takes a lot for me to allow others into this fold. They have to earn it. You drop me one time and I’m all eyes forward. No way am I going to allow myself to get hurt like that again. Sometimes people let us come crashing down out of spite, sometimes it’s simply a misstep or miscommunication. “You forgot to count to 3. I wasn’t ready yet. I’m sorry, I got distracted.” In any case, the trust fall becomes a trust fail.

And if we’re really honest with ourselves, we’ve dropped more than a few people, too. It happens, we’re human. We’ve left people to their own devices when they looked to us for help, we’ve failed to see the warning signs that someone was on their way down and we just couldn’t get our arms under them in time, or maybe we got distracted with our own stuff and weren’t there for them altogether. Again, this is our nature of imperfection. We’re going to let each other down and the walls are probably going to go up as a result. It’s our knee-jerk way of self-preservation. Sometimes it’s warranted against those who truly mean to hurt us and sometimes it’s seeded in a lack of willingness to forgive. We need to identify which is which in our earthly relationships and drop the brick exterior wherever possible. Holed up in a self-made fortress is no way to live. We also need to seek forgiveness for the times we’ve been on the dropping end of the scenario.

And while we find ourselves navigating situations of mistrust among those around us, I think we tend to do this with our relationship with Jesus as well. Something goes sideways in our lives and we assume He’s not there to catch us. We start believing that maybe He forgot about us in the midst of all that He has going on, that He’s walked away to focus His efforts on the other guy or gal who seems to be thriving far more than we are, or that His love for us has somehow become a flickering flame instead of a blazing inferno. The reality is that He’s ALWAYS there. He promised to ‘never leave us or forsake us.’ Not ‘I might not leave you’ or ‘I typically won’t forsake you.’ NO! ‘I will NEVER step away.’

Just the other day, I could feel a flare-up coming on and my frustration and anxiety grew with the knowledge of what was to come. I hate these bad days, they suck everything out of me and place the burden of total responsibility on everyone else. It’s awful. I was having a conversation with a friend who also struggles with chronic illness and we were talking about how exhausting this is. How life looks so different now and the smallest things we used to do without a thought have become things that take a ton of mental and physical energy, how we were once so self-sufficient and now we rely so much on the same people we used to protect from this kind of overload.

It’s downright soul-crushing. It can lend itself so easily to a dark place that is made up of feelings of uselessness and a mindset of ‘what’s the point.’ But then I got a few messages this week from people who are suffering from chronic illness themselves and they expressed gratitude for my willingness to continuously put my story out there. It’s in those conversations that I know there’s a purpose to this pain and God is working through my struggles.

But it’s still really hard you guys. No one (including me!) wants to show the raw reality of a drooping face, swollen eye, and slurred speech amongst the sea of others’ social media photos angled, cropped, and filtered to perfection (I do this to most of my own photos, too, so please know that I’m not judging). But the unaltered stuff, the days I resemble Quasimodo and have to rely on extra medication and assistance just to do the most menial of things, the moments my self-worth feels shattered - these are the days I feel like a beast among the beauties. Jesus has a front-row seat to my inner monologue and reminds me that these are also the moments that tell the story the way it really is and how much strength Christ can inject into our lives if and when we let Him. I can put the nice photos out there and eliminate the tough stuff, but the impact would be lost.

I feel that God has called me to trust fall in this area and I’m trying. I get scared that I’ll lean back into His purpose and He’ll turn to assist someone else, leaving me to crash down in the pain of my own public display of my story. He’s yet to do that though. And I know He never will because every promise He makes is one He keeps. The trust issue has to do with my heart, not Christ’s track record. He’s come through every time and I can know that He won’t stop now.

I don’t know what my future looks like. I don’t know if I’ll ever improve physically or if Jesus is using my medical condition to slow me down, help me focus and allow me to reach lives I would have never been able to connect with otherwise. What I do know is that this will all work out. That’s all the guarantee I need. So I’ll close my eyes tightly, lean back with no inhabitations. . . and trust falls into the arms of the One who loves me most.