Holding On For Dear Life!

There Is Always a Better Way

On a terrifying cliff, a little piece of metal, and learning to trust the rope

In high school, a group of my friends took me rappelling, and it was, to this day, the most frightening outdoor thing I have ever done. There is no describing the feeling of backing yourself off the edge of an enormous cliff while someone calls out, “No worries — the rope will catch you if you slip!” You have to feel that first rush of terror to understand it.

Heck, no was my thought about ten feet down. My arms began to tremble, my legs went weak, and the fear simply won. So I did the only thing my panicking body could think to do: I climbed back up the cliff, pulling myself along the rope one hand over the other, until my friends reached down, took my hands, and hauled me back over the edge to safety. They were laughing. I was terrified to the bone, my palms burned raw from gripping that rope for dear life. And once the shock wore off, I looked at them and said, “Okay — you need to explain the science to me, because I do not understand how that little piece of metal is supposed to stop me from falling to my death.”

I have thought about that question many times since. I just didn’t know, back then, that I was asking a spiritual one.

The gear

There is a wonderful article about rappelling I once read on climbing.about.com. What struck me was how each humble piece of gear has a job, and how not one of them is meant to be trusted to your own strength alone. It made a beautiful comparison to the gospel, and to the tools God gives us to descend the frightening places in life safely:

The anchor — the immovable thing bolted into the rock above you, often the very thing you cannot see from where you dangle. That is God. Fixed. Unmoving. Holding the whole system whether you can see Him or not.

The rope — what actually bears your weight and ties you to the anchor. His grace, and the covenants that connect me to Him.

The rappel device — that “little piece of metal” that looks far too small to hold a whole life. The small daily acts of faith: prayer, scripture, one honest word. They seem too slight to catch me. By design, they do.

The harness — the seat that spreads the load so no single part of you breaks. My people. The ward family the Bishop promised would hold me.

The autoblock — the safety knot that catches you if you lose control halfway down. Accountability. We all need this - especially during difficult moments where at times we need to reach out to others for accountability on a daily, or weekly or monthly basis as needed. 

The locking carabiner — the auto-locking kind, chosen over the screw-gate because it will not quietly come open under load in a weak moment. A covenant holds precisely because I cannot casually undo it.

The daisy chain — how a climber clips in to safety at every station, so she is never left unclipped between rappels. Reconnecting to the Lord anew at every stage of the descent.

And the friends who reached down and pulled me back over the edge? Every one of us needs a belay team. Nobody rappels alone.

• • •

There is always a better way

I want to tell you about the happy beginning I am living right now — though I will be honest that I am not all the way clear of it yet, because of how vulnerable I still feel.

A couple of years ago I heard a woman interviewed on a BBC program after she had received an award for her work. She is from Africa, and she is known for helping women find their way out of prostitution. (I have tried and tried to find her name and could not — if you know who I mean, please leave it in the comments with a link, and I will gladly update this post to honor her.) The thing that has never left me is what she teaches the women she rescues. She teaches them one sentence: there is always a better way. A better way to get food. A better way to earn clothing. A better way to pay the rent. Instead of turning to their own bodies, she teaches them to turn to God — to their Higher Power — and to trust Him to lead them to another way to get what they need.

There is always a better way. I have been saying it to myself like a rope I am gripping.

Because here is my own desire, underneath all the others: I do not thrive without feeling guided by the Spirit of the Lord. Since I was very small I have had an undeniable witness that there is a Father in Heaven who watches over us and turns our hardships into blessings. And somewhere in my marriage, when I stopped feeling that guidance, I told myself it was because I was married now — that the revelation came to my husband instead of to me. It shames me a little to write that down, but it is honestly what I believed. I used to joke that life before and life after felt like the difference between a slow walk in the woods — noticing the beauty, the smell, the small details — and hurtling along in a jet, trying to stick my head out the window to catch a breath of the air. We accomplished a great deal, and we moved fast. But I was missing the beauty of the journey. I was missing the guidance I had known my whole life.

The Bishop “stopped by”

Yesterday my Bishop stopped by, just to say hello. Anyone in my church knows what that usually means: the Spirit of the Lord nudged him to come.

My knee was hurting worse than it had a few days before. And you know how it goes. The Bishop asks, “How are you?” You mean to say “everything’s fine” — and then you see the love in his face, and your heart gives way, and you tell the truth instead. I told him more of what had been happening. We both cried. On his way out he looked at me limping and said, gently and with just enough humor to let me breathe, “It makes me sad seeing you limp around like that. Why, you don’t even have a leg to stand on.”

When he asked what my greatest need was, I told him the truth again: I felt extremely vulnerable. He knew exactly what I meant. He told me, carefully, about a woman who had once stood where I was standing, and who had chosen to leap — to reach for the very thing I am so tempted by right now — and how it had only tangled her ability to feel the Spirit, and nearly cost her standing in the church. Then he looked into my eyes and said something I have not been able to put down:

Just like you are limping right now, and your leg hurts — you have no idea how hurt you are on the inside. You have been carrying this abandonment for many years.

He asked me to contact him every single day — he said every single day — to tell him how I was doing. He said there were five hundred people in our ward family who knew how to serve, and that I would be well taken care of.

“Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge… but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD.”

— Leviticus 19:18

How grateful I am for a good Bishop, for his counselors, and for a Relief Society President I was able to forgive. She had once judged me for not coming to our activities. But yesterday, in a tender moment, I told her the reason I had stayed away was that I had been in so much pain — that some days it was hard even to breathe. Her eyes filled, and she said the most beautiful thing: “I need to live closer to the Spirit of the Lord. Then I would have known.” She looked off into the distance a moment, and then she pulled me into a hug, and we cried together.

Don’t we all just need to be loved? I do. My husband does. Every one of us does. It is only by the Spirit of the Lord that we come to understand each other at all — and when we are truly connected to that Spirit, there is no judgment in us. Only love.

The tough part

I have some hard decisions in front of me, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. There is something I want right now, badly, and I feel the pull of it. I am holding on to the counsel that dear people have pressed into my hands in these dark days — that whatever I decide, they will stand beside me; that no matter what choices my spouse makes, my children will look to their mother to know what is right; that I am to be strong, and to look at my kids, and choose accordingly.

Now, back to the cliff.

It takes real faith in the rope, the anchor, the little piece of metal, to lean your full weight off a mountain and trust that you will be held. God does not want me to miss the joy and the thrill of this life — He wants me to have it, but in a way that keeps me alive. Maybe there are stretches I will have to climb with no rope at all, by fingertips and courage; but I believe the same One guides every handhold and every foothold, and makes me stronger with every climb.

My whole prayer, right now, is that instead of trusting my own strength — burning my hands raw on the rope as I drop — I will lean back, and trust the Lord, and follow the counsel He has left me in the scriptures. I love the Bible, and I love the Book of Mormon; the stick of Judah and the stick of Joseph, both testifying of the same Christ.

I am beginning to have hope that I will choose the better way.

(I really hope so.)

Sending love and a prayer hug your way,

in hopes that you’ll send one back — perhaps we both need it.

With much love,

Steffanie