I feel as though the reality of Life -- the divine life of God's intent, my life's singular passion and pursuit -- dangles over my head, inches away. Its weight is so immense that although I am separated from it by space, I can feel it as one can feel the heat from a fire standing many feet away. Just the feeling of its immensity, of its significance, of its worth so close to me is beyond my ability to bear.
I find myself in a familiar predicament. On my spirit man's tongue I sense a sour flavor as one might imagine how a food item tastes seconds before it is in his mouth. It is the place where one stands on the precipice of surrender. His feet remain on familiar spiritual ground - the ground that though once was a steep, seemingly insurmountable mountain has become nothing more than an infinite plateau.
There is only one way off the plateau. It is not rolling up one's sleeves and attempting to climb higher; there is nothing to climb. Only a precipice. All that is to be seen below is mist; he does not know where or whether he will land.
But what will he do? In the very fiber of his being is this force that has inexplicably driven him onward through years and tears, through evils within and evils without, through joys and pains, through trials and flames. It was this burning force that corralled him through the deserts, drug him through the valleys, and pushed up the cliffs until finally he was driven to this place.
It's different this time. It's different because there are no more steps to be taken. Even if he decided to drudge on, there is no ground upon which to tread -- there are no footholds, no dunes, no steep rock faces. There is nothing.
What does one whose basest inclination, whose life's essence is movement -- what does he do when he reaches the end of road? He would go anywhere, scale any wall, climb any mountain, cross any bridge, drudge through the deepest swamp, walk through an ocean of desert -- but there is nothing. Only a cliff.
He knows the answer before the thought is even articulate in his mind. There are but two options: stop, or jump. He cannot stop. Stopping is a joke of an action. To stop is to contradict all that he has come to be. He could not stop if he tried. No, he must jump.
Still, he cannot help but take a moment to process the implications of this decision before he takes the plunge. To jump is to leave familiarity completely. It is a paradigm shift on his journey. He has come to the place where steps no longer suffice. He has been brought to the place where he will no longer be able to control his pace, his trajectory, or his routine. There is nothing to be known about the new journey before he jumps. There is no preparation for it, no insight. To leave this cliff is to leave any inkling of control, any semblance of logical certainty, forever.
But he must jump. As he inches toward the cliff, he begins to feel as though this jump will somehow take him higher. He dreams that it will take him where he has heretofore been unable to go. He dares to imagine that he will somehow be carried even farther than he had ever hoped, blissfully plummeting into a destiny yet unknown, into territory yet unoccupied, into lands yet uncharted.
He thinks of his heroes in the journey. Could this be the place they jumped? Or had he finally made it to a place even they had not yet been? Something tells him, "Not yet." But on he goes, unable to do anything but yield to the fire inside that will not allow him even to slow down. O that he would reach the end, having given all he had and more, having blazed a trail for many to follow!
He leaps. His figure fades into the mist. Time will tell the world where his leap has taken him; but as he falls, he smiles, feeling as though he may as well have already arrived.
