Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

faith & spirituality

When the falling was easy and the getting up is hard

In the late ’90s, a British band called Chumbawamba filled the radio waves with these words:

I get knocked down

But I get up again

You’re never gonna keep me down

It was a drinking song, mostly, with a festive beat perfect for party atmospheres. (I was present at a few of those back in the day and now I’m old.)

Such confidence in the words: “I get knocked down, but I get up again. You’re never gonna keep me down.”

But they’re such a lie. Not that I expected to find truth from a band whose name sounds like a bubble gum brand or gibberish.

The truth is getting knocked down hurts.

And getting back up again is hard. 

And sometimes, it’s tempting to want to stay down. Because what if I get back up and then get knocked down again? Won’t that hurt more?

—

To say our family experienced a fall seems an understatement. Like saying Humpty Dumpty tripped. I’m not sure I realized at the time, now four-and-a-half years ago, just how far we’d fallen. Or how hard it would be to get up again.

And I certainly didn’t consider that falling, which seemed to happen so fast, meant we’d somehow have to make up the distance between where we landed and where the fall happened.

Staying down never seemed like an option. But that was before we started climbing.

climb

For the inexperienced and untrained, climbing requires strength, muscles we might rediscover along the way. And it might take time. We’re not going to climb a mountain or crawl out of a pit in an hour.

It might be days, weeks, years.

There will be pain. Fatigue. Disappointment. Discouragement. Bitterness. Despair. Blame.

But no matter how the fall happened, the circumstances that led to it, the final step over the edge, the reality is it happened. And time can’t be reversed so it was otherwise.

When you find yourself at the bottom of a pit, for whatever the reason, the only way to go is up.

Staying down is admitting defeat. It might as well be a death sentence.

—

When we’re down, all we want is a way out. Rescue. I want someone to throw me a rope and lift me out of my trouble.

But even then, I don’t want to be the one to do all the work required to get out. I still might have to hold on and climb. I still have to believe it’s possible.summer

I want to think that getting back up after falling down is glamorous. That restoration is immediate.

What I’m learning is that it’s less like a dramatic movie rescue and more like clawing your way up out of the dirt. It’s a slow crawl into light. It’s squinting at the brightness when all you’ve known is darkness. It’s finding your feet again and re-learning how to walk. It’s pressing on, even when you slide back and feel like you’re losing ground. It’s inner strength and internal drive. It’s heart, mind and body working together to get to the place you were before.

And beyond.

When I think about our situation, I don’t want to go back to where we were before the fall. I don’t want to fight for what was but to strive for what could be. I want to climb out of the pit, rest on the plateau and then tackle the mountain.

Still, it takes work.

And for some reason, I didn’t expect that part of it. Or I wanted it to happen at a quicker pace. Or on my terms.

But all significant change takes time.

Seeds take root and become plants, but it doesn’t happen overnight. The tallest trees were once seeds and now stand as living testaments to the beauty of growth over time.

Buildings begin with a solid foundation, then walls and support beams and a roof. Who would decorate a house on the inside before the roof was finished?

Even Jesus’ resurrection from the dead required a whole day in between. (Couldn’t He have risen immediately? I’m not debating theology here, just curious.) And the Kingdom He started with that revolutionary act is still being built.

Why should my own resurrection be any different?

—

So maybe Chumbawumba had it right after all.

No one will get through life without falling.

It’s what we do after the fall that matters. <Tweet that>

Will we stay down and curse the ground on which we lie? Will we search the skies for rescue, praying and hoping for help to come, for someone else to do the hard work of getting us out? Or will we choose to start climbing? To determine to NOT stay down. To dig our hands into the rocks and dirt and pull with everything we’ve got. Will we struggle to the top, weary and with shaking arms and legs, having spent every ounce of strength, with bloodied and dirtied hands, covered in sweat?

Will we hang on just a little longer when everything in us wants to let go? (There is a time to let go, but make sure it’s the right time.)

hang on

Because while it’s true that restoration makes us new, that doesn’t mean it’s easy. It is grueling work to get back up and not stay down.

So whether you’ve fallen or grown discouraged or are on the verge of giving up on something or someone, consider how far you’ve already come.

Measure the distance between the ground where you fell and your proximity to the light. Choose to keep going toward the light, whatever that might be. A dream. A goal. Healing. Wholeness.

Get back up again.

Don’t let anything keep you down.

When the kingdom of God is like this

The news published early in the day, that our part of the country could possibly see a rocket launch into space. I saw the report at 7 a.m., thinking I had missed the event, not realizing until later that we’d actually have the chance at 6:45 p.m. Details go unnoticed before the coffee hits my system.

That night, after we picked my husband up from work and did the various dinner and homework routines, we dragged our porch chairs to the middle of the front yard and set our sights on the southeastern sky. Traffic rolled by as the evening darkened, and I couldn’t help but wonder what they thought of us, sitting in our yard, staring at the sky.

rocket launchI called us “weirdos” because, let’s be honest, it is not normal to set up chairs on your lawn, at night, in the fall, to search the sky. To be aware that something out of the ordinary is happening when you could just go about your day.

We sat and we watched and we checked Twitter because that is where we found updates on the rocket’s launch. That night, it was canceled because of a boat nearby. Disappointed that the launch was postponed, we continued to watch the sky for the International Space Station to cross over our little piece of earth.

The minutes ticked by and I began to wonder if we’d missed it. If maybe we should head inside and get the kids to bed because it was a school night, after all, and what in the world were we still doing in the front yard after dark staring at the sky? Lunatics, I tell you.

We craned our necks to the north, hoping for a glimpse, and then suddenly, there it was! A bright light streaking across the night sky, so obviously not a star.

And in an instant the universe became both small and huge. Small because we were connected, in a way, to the people aboard the station, watching their path across our part of the earth. Huge because they and it were way up there and we were way down here and the wonder is hard to contain inside myself.

To think, we could have missed it.

The next night, we did it again, setting our chairs up in the yard, waiting for a streak of light to pass across the southeastern sky. Checking and rechecking Twitter for updates until we finally got the word that the rocket exploded not long after launching. I’m not sure who was more disappointed, the grownups or the kids.

We never saw the rocket launch but I’m not sorry we stopped what we were doing those two nights to gaze at the heavens.

Because I think this is what the kingdom of God is like.

Jesus stepped into our ordinary world. His coming was witnessed by stargazers who had studied the skies, and later announced by a man who could read the times and herald his coming. The kingdom of God is here, he said. It’s closer than you could imagine!

I wonder if anyone could feel it, that sense of the world being small and big all at the same time. If God coming close to us in the form of a man made Him all the more connected to us and all the more vast. Certainly, there was a sense of wonder.

And it’s not just that the kingdom of God came with Jesus. It’s that it’s still here now. It’s moving and building and shaping and restoring, and we can’t always see it.

But every now and then, we find people who help us see it. They’re looking beyond the ordinary day to something extraordinary. They’re in an unusual position at an unusual time to get a better glimpse of this spectacular happening. And those of us who don’t know, haven’t heard, think maybe they’re just crazy or dreamers or idealists. Why can’t they just be like everyone else and stick to what’s normal?

Still, they stand and they watch and they point and say, “Look! Can you see it? Amazing!”

And sometimes we join them and sometimes we miss it. And sometimes we see something extraordinary and sometimes we’re disappointed.

No matter what, though, we’ve opened ourselves up to the possibility of the extraordinary.

Though we didn’t see anyone else sitting in their yard looking at the sky, thanks to social media, we discovered we weren’t the only weirdos we knew.

This, too, is what the kingdom of God is like.

It is extraordinary. It is happening now. And even when we can’t see it, we can talk about it and find others who are looking for it, too.