Wednesday afternoon, my free zone station was the playground. Three 4 and 5 year olds wanted to play there, and so it was easy for me to let everyone do their own thing while I kept an eye out for each of them.
One of them was a precious, timid four-year-old girl who had never come to our program before. She was shy and nervous and quiet, but once we got on the playground she was everywhere at once.
After she and her brother had their fill of the slides, stairs, and other toys on the main playground, they moved over to the stand-alone monkey bars that were nearby. She is a little, little person, and so I stayed close by as they adventured on the monkey bars and acted as a spotter to try to keep the potential for injuries to a minimum.
After mastering the monkey bars and growing bored with these as well, she followed her brother over to a kind of upright monkey bar ladder that was close by. Without hesitation, she climbed each rung to the very top. I looked up at her face just as she reached the top rung, and saw the look in her eyes just in time to see a look of absolute terror cross her face.
She had gotten to the top, reveled momentarily in her accomplishment -- then looked down. The ground was a lot farther away from her than when her feet stood on it. She couldn't possibly make it back on her own. She couldn't move. Every muscle in her body went tense and the only thing she could think to do was cry.
If this story were a gospel parallel I would talk about how we all reach that top rung at some point and realize we can't move forward or backward on our own. I would mention that we reach a point where the only way we will get ourselves to a safe place is if someone rushes to our aid. I would go on to tell you that this is exactly what happened in the four-year-old story, and that she needed my help to get out of this situation and I helped her down each rung of the ladder until she was safe on the ground.
But then I would be Jesus in this story. So this isn't what we're doing.
What remains true regardless is that fear truly can be paralyzing. It can keep you from telling the truth or admitting your opinions. It can prevent you from telling someone how you really feel or from taking a chance on something you don't think will ever happen. It can make you hesitate to ask forgiveness or make you reluctant to request an apology. It's a feeling we know all too well, and is one that has incredible potential to handicap our interactions with one another. The question we remain faced with is whether you will climb down from the place where fear takes you prisoner or if you will stay there, crying and helpless, until you are rescued. Either way you choose, there's no denying that you need deliverance.
