So here at the base there’s this water tower. It’s about 75 feet tall and includes a ladder so that you climb up to the top where it’s flat. Some of the crazier kids on my team have been climbing it since we got here and kept talking about how awesome it was up there. The lack of mosquitoes was really all the convincing I needed. So for the past couple of days I’ve been working up the courage to get up there. I would climb a few feet, freak out, and climb back down. But last night I decided I was finally going to do it. I got about half way up and got too scared to continue. But Jon prayed with me for courage and I tried again and made it. It was absolutely gorgeous up there. You can see both America and Matamoros, the Mexican city closest to us. The sky was clear and the moon and stars were bright. The wind was blowing really hard, and for a while I couldn’t even stand up because I was so afraid. Eventually though, I got more comfortable and was really enjoying it, so glad I had finally conquered my fear and made it up there.
Then it was time to come down. Which is tricky because there’s a square hole right in front of the ladder. You have to dangle one leg over the side of the tower and one leg into the hole then push yourself and your other leg up and over in order to even get on the ladder. I watched some of the other people do it, and it looked easy enough. Then it was my turn. As I approached the edge something broke inside of me. I was absolutely terrified. More scared than I had ever been in my whole life. My legs started shaking, I was crying, I couldn’t breathe. I backed up into the dead center of the tower and just stayed there. Jon and Tara were the only ones left with me, and they were trying their best to calm me down. I knew there was no way I was going to get down the ladder. I was shaking so badly that I wouldn’t be able to hold on, and I was afraid I would hyperventilate and pass out. My mind kept jumping to Matthew 4:7 where Satan is tempting Jesus and Jesus says “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test”. I felt like I had put God to the test by climbing the tower even though I knew I was afraid.
Jon went to get Bryan, thinking that if one of them went before me and one went behind me I would feel safer. But I was completely irrational and inconsolable. Bryan gave me a pep talk and somewhere in the midst of it quoted 2 Timothy 1:7 “for God gave us a spirit not of fear, but of power and love and self control”. I started to realize that this was so much bigger than a ladder, so much bigger than my fear of heights. I realized that I was actually going to go down the ladder, despite my sincere but ridiculous requests for a helicopter or the fire department to come get me. God had brought me up, and only He was going to bring me down.
We’d been talking a lot lately about the things that we hold onto so tightly in life that God calls us to give up to him. I would gladly give away my clothes and it would be hard to give up my computer or my iPod, but I really do think I could do it if God was calling me to. So I’ve been on an introspective hunt to find out what God wants me to surrender to him. And up on that tower I realized what it was. My fear. He wanted my fear. I finally saw that fear is nothing less than a lack of trust in God. He wanted me to trust him for real, when it mattered. When my life was at stake (not be be really overly dramatic or anything, but it was a really tall tower). I had been trusting God in shallow end, but he wanted to take me deeper. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to go there yet, and until I was there was no getting off of the tower.
In the end we were up there for 2 hours and it was 1:30 before I finally put myself entirely in God’s hands and was able to get back on the ground. I have never appreciated the solid earth more in my life. And never have I ever felt so safe and secure with God. I don’t really have the words to say how much that whole ordeal changed and grew me. And I don’t know if I’ll ever make it back up there, but I do know that at the end of the day God has me in his universe forming hands, and there’s no safer place anywhere.
