"For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything."
There is no feeling quite like that of clinging to a rock face forty feet above the ground. It is both terrifying and exhilarating. If you are a beginning climber like me, your arms begin to ache and your legs begin to quiver as you search for the next place to put your hands and feet. The person at the bottom who belays keeps telling you things that sound nearly impossible, like put your foot by your ear and stand up, and they tell you about a foothold that looks too small for a chinchilla. They cannot possibly know what they are talking about, can they? After all, you are the one who is in the middle of things. They are just standing there at the bottom. Then suddenly you feel the rope slacken and you look down to see the belay looking away, seemingly paying absolutely no attention to you or your predicament. And you know that the rope that they are holding is the only thing that will keep you from a forty-foot plunge to your death or dismemberment. Maybe they do not even know that you are about to let go and they will not realize in time to hold the rope tight if you fall and you will get hurt.
Let�s move down to the ground now. There are several things that go into belaying. The belay is strapped into a harness like the one the climber is wearing. The rope is hooked securely to it and when the climber climbs, all the slack is taken up immediately, so that the rope is always taut. The belay does not have to watch what is going on above him to know whether any slack is in the rope. He can feel it in his entire body. And from the bottom, outside the situation, it is so much easier to see what the climber is doing and what they are capable of.
That is kind of how I see us and God. God is our belay in life. He knows what we are doing, he can see so much more clearly than we can, and he knows what is ahead. When we see the little chinchilla sized foothold, He sees the entire shelf that it is attached to and he knows our abilities better than we do. He knows that it is a difficult move to make, but He also knows that as soon as we make it, we will have the greatest handhold. He makes suggestions that will take us to the top, but we still have to make the decisions that will get us there. He won�t make them for us. But no matter what, he will not let go of the rope. Even when we look back and it seems that he is not paying the slightest bit of attention to us, the truth is, He can feel our movements in His entire being and He will not let us fall!
