God was with us so we’d be with each other.
My son Adam is out of college and is fearless. He’ll try anything once, but he’ll do it several times if it’s life-threatening. If you can’t lose your arm doing it, he’s usually not interested. He started taking skydiving lessons this year. These weren’t the tandem jumps I was familiar with, where an experienced skydiving instructor is attached to the novice. These were solo jumps.
Understandably, there’s quite a bit of on-the-ground training involved in getting a skydiving license. In addition to taking some pretty involved classes before you get in the airplane, there are quite a few solo jumps you need to make with an instructor free-falling nearby to make sure you don’t freak out and crater. While there’s more instruction than I thought, there certainly isn’t as much as is needed.
When the kids were growing up, we weren’t a family you would find at the local field every weekend for Little League baseball or soccer. I would have had our children join a team just so I could eat the corn dogs, but the kids never seemed interested in organized sports, so we skipped most of it. Going out to the drop zone each weekend to watch Adam skydive felt a little like what I imagined going to a Little League game would be like. Except my son, the shortstop, would be falling from thirteen thousand feet. An unforced error in skydiving would be more of a game changer than a ball going between his legs near second base. This was more than a little unsettling to me as I watched him strap on his parachute each weekend, get in a plane with no door on it, and fly away.
Squinting as I looked toward the sun to find the airplane two miles overhead, I watched as Adam jumped out and started his free fall. He was smaller than an ant silhouetted against the bright blue sky. The free fall looks pretty slow from below, but the skydiver is actually falling through the air at two hundred fifty feet per second. Between the time Adam jumped out of the plane and the time the parachute opened, he had free-fallen a distance greater than twenty one-hundred-story buildings stacked end to end. That’s a lot of down elevator. Adam explained to me with a wink that all he needs to do to get the parachute to deploy is to reach behind him while he’s falling at 140 mph and find a small hacky sack ball connected to the main parachute to throw out. I always imagined if it were me doing the reaching, it wouldn’t be a hacky sack I’d find.
If the main parachute comes out, it gives a huge tug as it snaps full of air. If it doesn’t, I suppose it would look just like zooming in on Google Earth really fast. I know how forgetful Adam can sometimes be, so as he fell I found myself shouting from below, “Pull the chute! Pull the chute! Pull the chute!” and reaching behind myself as I did. After what always seemed like way too long, I would see the parachute open and hear Adam yelping with excitement and gliding in figure eights back to the grass field near the runway.
Some people listen to Christmas carols only in December, but I listen to them all the time. They also read the Christmas story only once a year. I read it every couple of months. It tells us God said, “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel.” A couple of verses later it says they “gave him the name Jesus . . .” At first, I wondered if perhaps Mary had twins.
Immanuel means “God with us.” As a father, I know what it feels like to want to be with your children. When God sent Jesus into the world, He demonstrated He didn’t just want to be an observer in the lives of the ones He loved. He wanted to be a participant. He wanted to be with the ones He loved. I do too.
After months of taking Adam to the drop zone each weekend, I decided to blow Adam’s mind. So while he was at work one week, I took skydiving lessons.
When I dropped Adam off the following week, he got out of the car, put on his parachute, buckled his straps, and got into the airplane. It was time for my big reveal, so I got out of the car, threw a parachute over my shoulders, buckled the straps, and got in the plane too. Adam did a double take as I sat down next to him.
“Dad, what are you doing?” Adam asked in disbelief.
“How hard could it be?” I shot back with a wink as I adjusted my helmet.
The plane started its engines, and we rolled down the runway. When Adam and I were a few miles up in the air, the plane engines slowed a bit, the pilot turned on a green light to let us know we were over the field, and we moved to the door. There are plenty of things to do to get ready to skydive, like pack your parachute, make a will, and say goodbye to loved ones. Once you get in the door to jump, there are only three things to remember: up, down, and out. That’s it. You practice this on the ground several times before you get in the plane. You rock up on your toes to let the people around you know you’re about to go, you crouch down like you’re about to jump, and then it’s right out the door.
You exit the plane into a 100-mph wind and immediately disappear from view. When Adam got to the door, he yelled, “See you on the ground!” He rocked up, down, and jumped out. Not surprisingly, Adam did a backflip as he jumped out the door and disappeared from view. I’m not really sure what came over me in the moment, but there was a massive jolt of adrenaline and an overwhelming desire to be with Adam in the air as he fell.
I sprang to the door, blew off all the up, down, and out stuff, and threw myself out of the plane with everything I had. I jumped so hard, I jumped right out of my tennis shoes. No joke. Try doing that sometime. It’s not easy, but it’s what it looks like to want to be with someone that bad.
I was free-falling in my socks and laughed when I realized what I’d done. After a long minute of free-falling, I reached behind me and pulled on the hacky sack, the parachute came out, and I landed in a field near Adam. He pretended he didn’t know me as I walked in my socks over to the airplane after it landed to get my tennis shoes back.
I know a little bit more now what it feels like to be a father who wants to be with his kids. Jesus did something a lot like what I did with Adam. He jumped out of heaven to be with us.
I have been watching Adam for his whole life. I know all about Adam, and he knows quite a bit about me. Still, there’s a big difference between knowing what someone’s doing and being with them while they do it. God knew we’d know the difference too. This has been the easiest way for me to understand one reason that God sent Jesus to us. He wasn’t sent because God was mad at us. He jumped out of heaven and came as Immanuel because He wanted to be God with us.
I’ve taken plenty of bar exams in the course of my career as a lawyer and have been licensed to practice law in quite a few states. Each of these bar exams takes between two and three days depending on the state, and they test everything you know about the law. By the end, your mind feels like melted Velveeta because you’ve gone through more than thirty long hours of testing. Guess how long the final test is while you’re free-falling to get your skydiving license? Half a minute. No lie. All you have to do is simply obey what you’re told to do for just thirty seconds.
Some people I’ve met who like Jesus a lot have told me they’re going to do whatever He tells them to do for the rest of their lives. I think that’s terrific. While I’d like to say the same thing with even half the confidence they have, I just can’t. It’s easy to talk about big ambitions you have for your faith, and theirs is certainly a beautiful one. I’ve started a couple of diets this way on January first, but I didn’t make it as far as I thought I would. What I’ve been doing with my faith is this: instead of saying I’m going to believe in Jesus for my whole life, I’ve been trying to actually obey Jesus for thirty seconds at a time.
Here’s how it works: When I meet someone who is hard to get along with, I think, Can I love that person for the next thirty seconds? While they continue to irritate me, I find myself counting silently, . . . twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine . . . and before I get to thirty, I say to myself, Okay, I’m going to love that person for thirty more seconds. This is what I’ve been doing with the difficult commands of Jesus too. Instead of agreeing with all of them, I’m trying to obey God for thirty seconds at a time and live into them. I try to love the person in front of me the way Jesus did for the next thirty seconds rather than merely agree with Jesus and avoid them entirely, which I’m sad to say comes easier to me. I try to see difficult people in front of me for who they could become someday, and I keep reminding myself about this possibility for thirty seconds at a time.
It’s easy to agree with what Jesus said. What’s hard is actually doing what Jesus did. For me, agreeing is cheap and obeying is costly. Obeying is costly because it’s uncomfortable. It makes me grow one decision and one discussion at a time. It makes me put away my pride. These are the kinds of decisions that aren’t made once for a lifetime; they’re made thirty seconds at a time.
When you’re getting your skydiving license, most of the class isn’t spent talking about what happens when things go right and the parachute opens correctly. Instead, they prepare you for what to do when it doesn’t. That seemed like a good idea to me. One of the things they teach you feels counterintuitive. The parachute is connected to your harness by hundreds of small strings. When it opens, you’re supposed to look up and see if all the strings are where they’re supposed to be. If there is just one string caught over the top of the parachute, they tell you to cut away the entire parachute, start free-falling again, then pull the emergency chute. I remember thinking, Are you kidding me? There’s no way I’m cutting away an almost perfect parachute because one small string out of hundreds of them is out of place. It’s good enough, right? Here’s the problem. If even one string is over the top, then the parachute will look like it’s fine while you’re up in the air, but you’ll never be able to land it. You won’t realize this until you get close to the ground and hit hard. The same is true with our lives.
I’ve tried to fly my faith more than a couple of times with a few strings over the top. Maybe you have too. It was colorful and looked good on the outside. To most people, it even appeared to be flying the way it was supposed to. I wasn’t trying to fake it or be a fraud. Most of us aren’t. While I knew I had a string or two over the top, the idea of cutting away everything and starting all over again sounded excessive to me. It sounded reckless, unsafe. Perhaps it does to you too. It didn’t to Jesus, though. He said He wanted us to become new creations. His plan for our renewal is that we cut away all the things hanging us up and start all over again each day with Him. He talked about cutting away things that entangle us and about pruning more than parachutes, but the concept is the same. When we get the wrong things over the top of our lives, we might look good for a short time, but we won’t land our lives well. If you have a string or two over the top of your life, cut it away. Will it be scary? You bet. Do it anyway.
There’s one last thing the instructor told us in class. He said if the main parachute doesn’t open up, and the reserve parachute doesn’t either, you’ve got about forty-five seconds before you hit the ground and make your mark. I was surprised and a little grossed out when the instructor said hitting the ground isn’t what kills you. Every bone in your body will break, of course. But after you hit the ground, you’ll bounce—and it’s the second time you hit that kills you as the broken bones puncture all your organs. I know that is kind of graphic, but it’s true.
I’m a lawyer, so with this information in mind I figured I needed a strategy. Here’s mine: if none of the parachutes open up, when I hit the ground, I’m going to grab the grass and avoid the bounce. What is true in skydiving is true in our lives. It’s usually not the initial failure that takes any of us out; it’s the bounce. We’ve all hit the ground hard at work or in a relationship or with a big ambition. Whether we had a big, public failure or an even bigger private one, the initial failure won’t crush our spirit or kill our faith; it’s the second hit that does. The second hit is what follows when things go massively wrong or we fail big, and the people we thought would rush to us create distance instead. They express disapproval or treat us with polite indifference.
If we want to be like Jesus, here’s our simple and courageous job: Catch people on the bounce. When they mess up, reach out to them with love and acceptance the way Jesus did. When they hit hard, run to them with your arms wide open to hug them even harder. God wants to be with them when they mess up, and He wants us to participate.
I keep putting on my parachute and getting in the plane with Adam on the weekends. Truth be known, I don’t like skydiving as much as he does, but I like Adam a lot. Find what the people you love want to do and then go be with them in it. If Adam wanted to make pizzas, I’d grow the tomatoes. Be with each other. Don’t just gather information about people who have failed big or are in need—go be with them. When you get there, don’t just be in proximity—be present. Catch them. Don’t try to teach them. There’s a big difference.
We don’t need a plan to do these things. We don’t need to wait for just the right moment. We just need to show up, grab a parachute, and when it’s time, jump out of our shoes after people the way Jesus jumped out of heaven to be with us.
Sometimes we make loving people a lot more complicated than Jesus did. We don’t need to anymore. It’s just up, down, and out.