A recent blog post from Renovaré (which is a wonderful organization, both for Christians who want to go deeper in their faith, and for folks who have been badly hurt by the Church and who are looking for an experience of God that’s more full of grace and quiet and stillness, rather than of legalism and stern obedience) challenged readers to create our own parable to describe the Kingdom of Heaven. How would we describe, the author asked, our experience of being on mission with God and of being with Him?
I call mine the parable of the waterslide.
The parable of the waterslide has three parts.
Gentle Pressure
First, imagine that you are at Water World. You’re at the top of a slide, and you can feel the water surging underneath you. For the moment, you are still.
In that moment, you have a choice. You can, if you so desire, throw out your arms and legs and block yourself from going down the slide. That is to say, you have free will.
If you choose to do this, then God will not force you down the slide. No giant wave will swell to knock you, screaming and flailing, the way that the slide would like for you to go.
What you will feel, however, is the gentle pressure of God: the persistent flow of water underneath you. You will feel a sense for how natural it would be to just relax into the water, to surrender and to let it carry you where it wants to go.
That’s often how I hear from God. It’s not orders or commands. Most often, it’s a gentle nudge, coupled with a soul-deep sense of rightness when I surrender my own will, tuck my arms and legs securely, and simply let God carry me where and when He wills it.
Fear
I used to be terrified of heights. Couple that with what used to be a pretty intense fear of almost everything (including water and the unknown), and I was scared of some of the bigger slides at Water World for far more years than I would like to admit.
Now, most of that fear has gone. But I still feel a tingle up my spine as I prepare to fall down a 60-foot mostly-vertical slide. Something inside of me is terrified that I’m going to fall off and splatter all over the concrete.
This mirrors how I sometimes feel about life with God.
The truth is that life on mission with God can be scary. I see this in my prison ministry: some of the guys I work with are both violent and unrepentant, and I’m aware that they could knock my teeth out if they felt like I was poking them the wrong way. Plus, some of them have pretty intense triggers, and I’ve got to be aware that saying or doing the wrong thing could provoke a disproportionate response.
And yet, I’m called into prison anyway.
But the fear of life with God doesn’t always (or even often) manifest as fear for my life. Far more often, the stuff that God is inviting me into is simply far outside of my comfort zone. Opening up to my wife a year ago about my struggles with porn was scary, for instance. I knew that God was inviting me into that conversation, but I was also frightened that my wife would leave me.
Even apologizing to people whom I’ve wronged can feel daunting. There’s always the fear that they’re going to hold it over my head.
And yet, part of the key to this parable is that, just like my fear of falling off the waterslide and splattering all over the ground, the fear that comes from being on mission with God is an illusion. The things of which I’m frightened don’t have to actually scare me. The simple truth is that, if I trust God and stay close to Him, I’ll be alright.
I love how Dallas Willard puts it in Life Without Lack: “God is the kind of being who, if you will place yourself in his hands, in trust, will ensure that nothing can ever happen to you that will make you say, ‘I’m afraid’ or ‘I don’t have enough.’”
Joy
The third piece of this parable is joy. Underneath the fear, of course, it’s quite simply exciting to go down a good waterslide. Anyone who views such an activity as a chore is approaching the slide in a very strange way.
And the truth is that there’s something deeply joyful about life with God. Sure, it’s scary at times, but it’s also wonderful and thrilling and full of love. Life with God is when I write the fiction that can rip my heart out, when I can be with an inmate in his pain and see some of the light come back into his eyes, when I can plan a fun scavenger hunt for my wife just because I know that it will make her smile.
I love how Bog Goff describes life with God in Love Does:
“Every day God invites us on the same kind of adventure. It’s not a trip where He sends us a rigid itinerary, He simply invites us. God asks what it is He’s made us to love, what it is that captures our attention, what feeds that deep indescribable need of our souls to experience the richness of the world He made. And then, leaning over us, He whispers, ‘Let’s go do that together.’”
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