Cliff Hanging

I am a cliff hanger. I know that we usually think of cliffhangers as stories without resolution meant to draw you back for the next installment. No, I don't mean that kind of cliffhanger.

When it is time for me to embark on a new adventure, I tend to stand on the cliff looking over the edge and try to evaluate the situation. I am a thinker. I am not a " ready, shoot, aim" person. I want to look before I leap. I want to know where I'm going to land. The difficulty is that usually when you are standing on the cliff, there is a lot of mist at the bottom and you can't really evaluate what kind of landing you are going to make.

I recently made a jump I'd been trying to evaluate for....well, a long time. Maybe you have experienced a nagging feeling that there is something you are supposed to do. As a Christian, when I feel that way I try to determine if that nagging feeling is the still, small voice of God. Over time I became convinced that in this case it was. But in this situation, I basically tried to talk God out of it. Maybe you've done that, too. When the nagging feeling didn't go away, I determined that it really was God and He wasn't giving up. So, even though I don't really know where I am going to land, I made the jump and obeyed that still, small voice.

The thing about it is that once I went ahead and began the process, "made the jump", a lot of my waffling and attempts to make excuses for not doing it seemed to disappear. I am confident that I jumped off the right cliff, so to speak, and that wherever I land will be the right place at the right time.

Sometimes you just have to jump into new things. When you get right down to it, the reason that I wasn't willing to jump was lack of trust. A lack of trust in my ability to follow through in what God was asking me was not really the problem. At the core, my unwillingness to jump was a lack of trust in God Himself. If He is asking me to do something, to jump off the cliff, then He's got to have the landing all figured out even though I can't see it, right? When I land, I'll tell you more about the trip.

Are you hanging onto a cliff right now? If you are, what is your reason for not making the jump? I can tell you from experience that once you commit yourself and get airborne, the view is going to be awesome. So stop hanging onto the cliff and enjoy the ride!