Plunge

A new believer mingles with a pack of those like them. They move in a herd-like fashion – sometimes at the behest of God’s voice, other times simply because it seems to be what the pack decided to do. Why, if you ask any of those in the group, are they going specifically in the direction everyone else is going? “Because everyone is”, they reply.

But a specific one hears the voice of God on their own in such a way that they veer away from the pack, until they stand in front of an opaque pit, with a bottom fathomlessly deep. The voice tells them to jump. And they don’t. They aren’t stupid. But the voice gives life in a way that felt wrong to resist. They obey as far as they can, and tip-toe to the edge – then they slip and fall in.

Gravity grips and pulls their body into the cold abyss.

Terror-filled, they fall ever-long.

They scream into the void, as they come to understand their new fate

Moments turn to minutes, then to hours.

“Is this what the voice had wanted?”, they ask themselves full of anxiety. “Am I to die by impact or through fright? Did I hear God at all? Am I just stupid and have been following my own delusions into this pit?”

They continue to fall…

Hard hitting thoughts and feelings hammer in as if from outside oneself: “Look at the terror that is this darkness. Feel in your every nerve the angst of your uncontrolled fall. Struggle to breathe out through your seeping anxiety”. And they notice they do, as it struggles through their throat like through a bent and broken pipe. Amplified fear envelops them in the same way the darkness does and joins them in their plunge.

Other thoughts beckon: “Remember all that you once had. Remember the sunlight above. Remember the people you cherished and all that is now seemingly gone”. A deep sense of despair wraps around them as a garment in their descent.

Then a voice is heard that sounds remarkable like the thoughts before: “Deliverance will come to you – only plead with God hard enough to get you out of this. You can have good things, and escape this nightmare.”

And as the believer continues to fall, they sense both things at once: fear even greater than before and hope of escape.

But this is not the voice that led them into the pit – the one that they learned to trust and love. This one does not imbibe life. And as they consider, and more moments tick away, the intensity of the fear begins to ebb, and the hope offered by the voice begins to dull a little. Their mind clears by inches.

Then, a consideration of their own: “Why are they being spoken to? And why are they being offered something that sounds remarkably like a deal? “

Is there relevance in their fall?

Should terror bully them into becoming a fragile wretch – for the sake of escape? Or should they be brave in a fall to destruction? It is a choice that will change them forever.

They find they don’t have the capacity to choose, and continue their endless plunge, as the imposter voice disappears in the darkness, and small courage blossoms as if on its own within them.

It yields itself to the mind: A sense of personal challenge grows in spite of impending doom

And although they have lost their hopes and dreams that existed above, they see and realize something they never have before: that their life before the pit is that which compromises their character as they fall through it.

Then they accept all that is their new reality and smile. They rejoice in the situation of despair as they look forward to the bottom as one who is not doomed, but one who has been challenged by it, and outgrew it.

Then in the blink of an eye, they are once again at the edge of the abyss.

Bewildered, they walk away in a newness of life they never had before.