Did you start singing Tom Petty’s song when you saw the title? Are you singing now that I brought it up?
I apologize. That’s not what this blog is about.
Have you ever found yourself in the midst of major a life event? You change jobs or positions thinking things will be better or go smoother. Everything starts out well, but when the honeymoon is over everything changes. What about a relationship you’ve experienced? You enjoy the person you’re with. You think they’re the one only to find yourself crying a year into the marriage. Then there is the spiritual side of things. You’re going along doing as you believe you are supposed to be doing and something catches you so far off guard, making you question your faith.
Life events are like a free fall. Something so amazing happens that you begin to live in the clouds of happiness and bliss. Everything is perfect. Everything goes right. Everything feels good.
Then it happens. You have a bad day at work. Your spouse says or does something you never imagined they would. Your friends of faith go beyond the Word they are suppose to follow. Whatever it is, it comes out of nowhere and hits you so hard, you fall off the clouds you have been living on.
It’s during the free fall to the ground, you question everything. Every choice you made. Every word you spoke. Every action you took. Question after question after question runs through your mind as you’re trying so hard to figure out how to get back to the safety of the clouds before you hit the hard truth of the ground below.
The problem with life events is that we can’t take any of them back. Words can’t be unsaid. Choices can’t be undone. There is no way to propel us back to the cloud of the fairy tale we had been living in. Try as we might to flap our arms and fly, we weren’t created that way. We have to embrace the free fall as we face reality and let go of the fairy tale.
Letting go is hard though because we try to take as much of the life we had while on the cloud to the ground with us. We can’t. It can’t be done. We have to let go of everything. The sensation from getting the new job. The doe eyes full of love. The spiritual bubble that we believe won’t pop.
Now, before I go any further, I need to clarify something. I’m not saying that getting a new job, marriage, or having faith are bad or wrong. I’m focusing on those moments when life gets tough and we question everything. We can’t seem to figure out what happened and we have no idea where we are headed next. This is the free fall. The time of doubt and disbelief as we brace for impact. We don’t always want to face the truth, but we have to if we want to survive the fall. We have to embrace the fact that the bad day at work might have been our own doing or a due to a miscommunication or misunderstanding on our part. We have to accept that we learn more about our spouse the longer we are with them and they must do the same with us. We have to learn that our faith will go through trials that are easy to win, but there will always be bigger, harder tests to endure.
It’s during the free fall that we acknowledge what went wrong so that we have a plan of action by the time we hit the ground.
