Hanging By A Thread

I have very much enjoyed watching recently the BBC series ‘Freeze The Fear’. In that series, a group of celebrities when through a number of physical challenges, mostly to do with enduring the cold, under the guidance of Wim Hof, a Dutch extreme athlete who is also known as ‘The Iceman’.

A theme that ran through the series was the value of facing up to our fears and the climax was the challenge of a bungee jump from a very high road bridge somewhere high in the Italian mountains. Most of the celebrities chose to jump, and my sketch is an impression of how I remember them, swinging under the bridge, often screaming or shouting with delight – or maybe relief, or maybe a mixture of a number of intense emotion.

The phrase ‘hanging by a thread’ somehow comes to mind. This expression is typically understood to refer to being in a very dangerous situation or state, perhaps being close to death, or failure of some kind. But it struck me, as I watched these brave men and women dangling at the end of the bungee rope, that they were perhaps experiencing more than just relief that the rope had worked, and that they had survived.

I couldn’t help but think of a different sort of ‘rope’ that has been literally vital for each one of us – namely, the umbilical cord that connected us with that life support system otherwise known as a mother while we developed in the womb. Is it possible that, at a visceral or subconscious level, these celebrities were reconnecting with that past experience we all share – when for each us, in some sense, our whole lives were relying on that cord, hanging as it were by a thread?

Then there was another thought that struck me. Perhaps we spend so much time being wise and sensible, doing what we can to protect both ourselves and those we love against the potential dangers of hunger, sickness, and other dangers, that we end up telling up ourselves that we are safe and secure. When the reality maybe is that, no matter how careful we are, no matter how much insurance we have, we might never, ever, be that far away form the possibility of something going very badly wrong for us.

I don’t say this out of a desire to be gloomy for the sake of it, or to make anyone feel sad or worried for no good reason. As a Christian, I believe there is a paradox here. Life is wonderful, but it is also terribly fragile and temporary; it is as if our lives amount to almost nothing at all, and yet there is a God who loves us and who regards us as significant. For me this paradox is very well expressed in Psalm 103: As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him. For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust. As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field (verses 13-15, English Standard Version).

As I was watching my television, seeing those celebrities exult in having survived their jump, I found myself wondering, have they perhaps connected with an underlying reality about how all of life really is – that forever howling any of us has on this earth, the most fundamental joy and security can be found in knowing that there is a loving God who is holding the rope, in fact who is the rope itself? Some of them, before they launched themselves off the side of the bridge, clearly battled with the logic of doing the jump – why take the risk? But what if all of life is really about being prepared to take a risk, as opposed say to trying to protect ourselves against any possible danger. Maybe the biggest danger of all is to fail to live a full life because of a fear of what might go wrong. Maybe hanging by a thread isn’t so bad?