Clinging

“Hold this bar and step out onto the platform”  the skydiving coach yells his instructions over the scream of the plane’s engines and the whipping wind.  I am basically brain-dead – terror and adrenaline in full control.  Other parachuters stare at me also mute with terror, including my friend, Gina.  I know what she’s thinking.  What possessed us to do this?  What were we thinking??

Since I am brain-dead, the instructor forces my hands to the bar below the wing.  I have the sense to grab on.  Then to my horror, he gives me a nudge.

This is a business after all.

The wind sweeps my feet off the platform so that my body is airborne, parallel to the plane, underneath its wing, literally flapping.  I clutch the bar for dear life.

In fact I decide at that moment I will NEVER let go of this very bar.  They can just land the plane with me underneath.  There is NO way I will let go.

That’s when the exasperated instructor forces my fingers one at time from the bar.  There’s no more nudging.  He hurdles me into the waiting wind and a violent drop toward the quilted farmland of central Illinois.

The static cord attached to my parachute immediately engages and a parachute billows into being.

Then quiet.  My body sways gently as I befriend the wind which had treated me so cruelly seconds before.  My brain reappears.

The image of me clinging to the bar of that plane has become my life’s metaphor.  I am a clinger.  I don’t Let-Go well.  Take parenting.  It crushed me to see my son and daughter leave the nest.  To this day, if Alex returns home for a night, it’s all I can do not to cradle her head, hold her hand, and basically gush baby-talk to this now 27-year-old business woman who is not fond of physical touch from her mom.

I cling to memories, holidays, vacations, routines, even ends of books where I have to say good-bye to characters I’ve grown to love.

But I do have a choice.  I can cling to my proverbial bar trying to pin down that which is transitory.  Or, I can compel that brain of mine to cling to the eternal, to that which satisfies the soul.

I googled the word “clinging” in the Bible and here are some verses that popped up.  They seem command-like, as if God knows my tendency to wallow in temporal clinginess.

Psalm 63:8  My soul clings to You; Your right hand upholds me.

 

So, may I cling to the hand of God and know that I am held fast in return.