There’s an old joke that I often tell. It’s even in one of my books.
An atheist falls off a cliff and grabs hold of a branch halfway down.
A hundred metres above him, a hundred metres below him: nothing but sheer rock, with jagged boulders waiting at the bottom.
In desperation he shouts, “Is there anyone up there?”
A booming voice replies, “Yes. It’s Me, God Almighty.”
“Well, thank God You exist!” he cries. “I’ll do anything if You save me. I’ll keep the Sabbath, be honest in business, love my neighbour – just name it, God!”
“My child,” replies God, “I love you. There is nothing you can do for Me. All I ask is that you do something for yourself. Trust Me. Just let go of the branch, and I will catch you.”
The atheist looks down at the rocks, looks back up and asks, “Is there anyone else up there?”
Letting go is, I believe, one of the hardest things we human beings ever do.
The manna in the desert was the ultimate lesson in letting go. You had no food today for tomorrow. If you tried to store up manna, it spoiled. Every morning you simply had to trust that it would be there again.
We crave the security of control. We want our destiny to be firmly in our own hands. Relinquishing that control is exquisitely difficult. Letting go of what we can see and casting ourselves, rather, into the uncertainty of the unknown goes against every instinct we possess.
And yet…
I have found that there is far more leverage in the unknown than in the known. Why rely only on the tiny resource of what I already know, when what I do not yet know is infinite? Whenever I have had the courage to look there instead – frightening though it is – I find myself standing on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, exploring strange new worlds and boldly going where no man has gone before (apologies to the under 30s).
Whenever I stop trying to force life according to my own thinking – with all its ego, insecurity and limited vision – and instead allow something greater to guide me, I always seem to arrive exactly where I need to be. Usually somewhere I could never have planned or imagined for myself.
And still, next time I find myself clinging to a branch, staring down at the jagged rocks below, I still don’t want to let go.
Not at all.
Experience tells me I’ve never crashed and burned on those rocks. Every time I’ve let go, I’ve found something beneath me so much gentler than I expected. And yet, when the next branch comes along, it is just as hard to release my grip.
Oh, we human beings are such strange creatures. Or as my father, of blessed memory used to say, ‘there’s nowt so strange as folk.’
