Dazed by the Fall

A couple of years ago, I was working in my barn and needed a small roll of wire hanging from a nail near the roof. I found my step-ladder, set it up on the level floor, and climbed up to retrieve the wire. For almost 25 years, I’d worked off a step ladder every day, so I didn’t even give it a thought. I just went up it like a squirrel. I stopped at the last OSHA approved rung—two steps from the top and reached to get the wire, but it was just out of my reach. So, I climbed up one more rung and reached to grab it.

The ladder went one way, and I went the other. In all those years of construction work, I’d never fallen off a ladder—not even the ones that were precariously set in really dangerous places. Here I was, with all four legs of the ladder squarely set on level ground, and now I was flying through the air with the greatest of ease. As I fell, it was if my life clicked into slow motion. I fell between an old cast iron warm morning coal heater that had belonged to my great-aunt and a roll of extremely sharp barbed wire. I landed with all my weight on the ball of my back (on my shoulder blades) with my feet in the air.

It’s amazing how much force can be achieved by two hundred or so pounds in the space of about 5 feet. I can now say this from personal experience: it’s not the fall that hurts; it really is the sudden stop that creates the biggest problem. When I hit it the floor, it knocked the breath out of me. I’m not sure how long I lay there because I was a little dazed and unsure what had happened or where I was. So I just lounged there in a crumpled pile on my shoulders with my legs and feet sticking up in the air and my head in the dirt—expecting at any moment to feel a rush of excruciating pain as my spirit and soul departed from my now shattered body. But the pain never came, so my thoughts of certain departure were a bit premature.

Instead, I rolled over on my side and my legs finished their plunge to earth. I was stunned. I couldn’t figure out what had happened or how I’d gotten into the position I now found myself in. So, baffled and bewildered I just lay there. As I looked up I could still see the little roll of wire still hanging from a nail near the roof of the barn. I could also see the ladder and it confused me a bit because the last thing I remembered was standing on the step marked “Do Not Stand On!” All of a sudden, reality hit me as I stared up at the wire and the empty ladder. I’ve fallen and I can’t get up…

It was at that precise moment I remembered the sequence of overextending my reach, losing my balance, and crashing to the floor like a meteor. I remembered from where I had fallen.

To figure out what had happened and to learn a valuable lesson from the experience, it was necessary for me to re-assemble the pieces of that event—one memory at a time—from the beginning to the end. It was essential for me to remember where I had fallen from and why. It would have been easy to have gotten up, brushed myself off, made sure no one had witnessed the crash, and then went on my merry way. No harm! No foul!

And that my friend is what we tend to do in our relationship with Christ. It is so easy to make a wrong turn in our relationship with Christ—to be on the right road but going in the wrong direction and not even know it—to become enamored with the good things of God, while forgetting to nurture and care for our relationship with God. We can easily get caught up in doing all the right things for God and not be within a hundred miles of God. We can be involved in a myriad of ministries, activities, or spiritual disciplines and totally loose contact with the Lover of our Souls. We can possess a fantastic spiritual resume and have no real relationship with the God, who loves us without measure. We can be on the right road—just going in the wrong direction.

In a relationship, action without affection is always a recipe for a disaster, i.e. a long fall with a loud crash. The sad thing is most of us don’t even feel the sudden jolt when we hit. We just roll around for a time and expect things to be the same. After a while we get up, dust ourselves off, make sure no one was looking, and go about the business of serving God, never realizing we have slipped and fallen, or that our relationship with him has cooled. If we never comprehend we have fallen—we will never see the need for a personal revival. If we don’t take a few moments now and then to remember what our relationship with Christ was like in the beginning, we will never look up and realize how far we have fallen.