Small children are taught to
face dangers and difficulties by holding hands with their daddies.
Most people grow out of
this. I never did.
When I was 13, my Dad and I decided to climb a
“fourteener”. Early one summer
morning when the air was still chilly enough to make clouds of our breath in
the half-light, we started up Long’s Peak together.
Our legs were just warmed up,
when we came up behind a group of college age guys, the football team at CU in
Boulder. For a few minutes, we
hiked close enough behind two of the guys to overhear their words. “This is pretty tough, a girl
couldn’t make it...” I didn’t linger to hear the response. Instantly I
determined to beat those college athletes to the top of the mountain. I switched into a high gear and
blazed by, pointedly flipping my long blond braids over my shoulder as I
passed. We left the football team
in the dust, and raced them the rest of the day.
We flew through shady
forests, miles filled with lodge pole pines growing tightly together, narrow
tops pointing toward heaven. We
strode through the gnarled trees at timberline, not pausing to wonder at the
fields of miniature wild flowers that carpet the mountainside. We scrambled
through the boulder field.
Sweaty, and with legs beginning to ache, we reached a narrow hole in the
rocky ridge where climbers pass to the back of the peak for the final push to
the top.
This final mile crushed my
bid to defend the strength of girls everywhere. The mountainside is steep; each misstep is accompanied by
the scrape and rattle of loose rocks tumbling down the sheer drop-off of
thousands of feet. Slips are
sometimes fatal.
Fear of falling slowed me
down. My short little body
defeated me. Even stretching as
far as I could, my fingers and toes couldn’t grasp the next little ledge or crack I needed
to use to pull myself up the last rocky cliff.
That’s where hands came
in. Over and over, my dad’s strong
hands boosted me from behind. In particularly difficult spots he scrambled up
ahead of me, reached down, grasped my arm, and pulled me up from above. “It’s OK Bethy, I’ve got you.”
My rivals, the CU football
guys caught on to my determination, if not the motivation behind it. They slowed their own pace to
help pull and push me up. Eventually,
I sat at the top scraped, and triumphant, sharing lunch at the top of the world
with my former enemies. The fact
that they gave me a hand up made all the difference.
During the steep and
dangerous seasons of adult life, when I can’t quite reach a
firm foothold, it is still a father’s hand that pulls me up and over.
William Barkley said, “When we believe that God is Father, we
also believe that such a father’s hand will never cause his child a needless
tear. We may not understand life
any better, but we will not resent life any longer.”
In the book of Isaiah, God
says “For I, the Lord your God, hold your right hand; it is I who say to you,
‘Do not fear, I will help you.'" He is saying to me, "its OK Bethy, I’ve
got you.”
We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanence, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern. The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now.
