A few weeks ago, Emily and I packed the kids in the car and joined our extended family for a week at Wisp. Four years had passed since we were last on the slopes. I was eager to knock off the rust and my son, Brody, was just as anxious to pick up where he left off as a three-year-old.
Monday morning found us atop the mountain overlooking the Deep Creek valley below. Our skis crunched under a fresh blanket of new fallen snow; I snapped the long tether guide to the harness fastened around Brody’s waist and readied my legs to be the emergency brakes for our serpentine descent down the mountain. Our breath made tufts of smoke as we talked back and forth—me giving the tutorial and Brody barking back acknowledgments in quick-fire bursts.
Before I let gravity to do its job, I asked him if he was ready. Turning his head slightly, Brody said, “Daddy, I’m a little scared because the slope is so steep…but I know that when I start sliding and pick up too much speed, I’ll be ok because I’m tied to you.”
I didn’t think too much of it at the time, but the Lord finds ways of taking the recreational and making it teachable if we pay enough attention. It’s as if God was using the mountaintop as a megaphone moment to make a relational point…and the point is this: A child can stare into the face of a formidable challenge for no other reason than they know that they’re tethered to someone who not only has the strength to sustain them through the slides, but would rather die than to give up their grip on them.
If an imperfect father can commit that kind of hold on his child, then how much greater is God’s grip on us? Though the peaks be high, the valleys deep, there’s no slope so steep and no fall so far that God won’t descend to get us—and not because we’ve stayed so tethered to God, but rather God stayed so tethered to us.
John says it differently: “If you want to know love, this is love: It’s not that we loved God, but that God loved us and sent his son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4: 12). Love is the tether that ties Advent and Lent together. It’s my prayer you’ll put yourself in a place to see the lengths the Lord will take to let you know the depths of His love—a love that will not let you go.
