#TMMMDI: episode one - jumping off a bridge

[To understand what TMMMDI stands for or why I'm writing this blog, see the previous post…]

As I'm sure I've never mentioned to any of you, I went on a gap year. And on that gap year, I went to Victoria Falls, which turned out to be quite a story. But before all of that had happened, I got offered the chance to bungee jump off a bridge over the river, just after the falls. And it was pretty expensive so at first I decided that actually, it'd be really fun and everything, but I couldn't justify spending the money on it. And then I had a conversation with my mate Emily, and I really can't remember what she said, but somehow it made me think about the whole thing as a metaphor – and once I'd had that thought, there wasn't much I could do.

I thought to myself – it's kind of like a leap of faith.

But to be honest, I'm not a big fan of the phrase, 'a leap of faith', I think it's stupid because it implies kind of closing your eyes and jumping out into the dark without really knowing what's going to happen, just with a sort of blind optimism that there must be something there – and in my opinion, and indeed my experience, believing in God doesn't have to be like that at all!

But what's especially fun is that, thinking about it now (and I honestly can't remember how sophisticated my understanding of the metaphor was at the time) it turns out that a bungee jump is a surprisingly good metaphor of what it's like to follow Jesus.

You're standing on the edge of a bridge. It's solid enough, you're in control. Of course, you're not completely in control – the bridge could snap at any time, there could be an earthquake or whatever – but it feels like you are and to a pretty major extent that's true. But then you look over the edge, look up, deep breath, arms out: throw yourself off.

And it's exhilarating. It's mental. It's amazing. Because you are in free-fall – you are rushing through the air, watching the seething mist of the river fly up towards you – and you can't see anything that's going to stop you. Your senses are telling you that you are falling from a great height and you're not going to stop – and your body accordingly produces tonnes of adrenaline and it feels epic.

But here's the thing: it's not exhilarating because you're not sure if you are actually falling to your death or not. It's not thrilling because there's a decent chance you're going to die – or at least, I wouldn't find that thrilling. If I actually wasn't sure that there was a big fat piece of elastic securely tied to my ankles I would have just been flipping terrified. It would have been horrific! And I wouldn't have felt free, liberated, expansive – I would have been paralysed by fear.

No, it's incredible because you know for sure that you're safe – you know for sure that they've tied the thing to your feet and you've seen the guy before you do it and it all works, it can take your weight. You know that. But your body doesn't know that. You can't see, and you can't particularly feel this thing that you're relying on – you're trusting it. And that feeling – free-falling in trust – is awesome.

And that's not a bad metaphor for what it's like to follow Jesus. There are plenty of good reasons to think that some kind of God must exist – I personally found the startlingly simple argument about the fact that anything exists all pretty powerful when I was becoming convinced about Christianity. Then there's Jesus. Historians are convinced that he existed. And there's a spectacular weight of historical evidence that his disciples must have encountered him having come back from the dead. (Basic intro to that argument here, or this video is brilliant and goes into a bit more depth, I'd recommend.) So for me, starting to follow him wasn't much like a leap in the dark – I definitely had some big fat elastic tied to my ankles!

But nevertheless, it does involve that crazy moment, where you look down from the solid bridge of self-security that you're standing on – you know who you are, you're in control of your own life, you're the master of your fate, the captain of your soul – and you take a deep breath, put your arms out and jump off, into the exhilarating free-fall of trusting someone else completely.

And it's exciting. It's epic! And even when it doesn't feel that great, even when it feels like there's no hope for you, no way you're coming back up, there's always this: you've seen the guy before you do it. You've seen that Jesus dived all the way down into death and came rocketing back up again, out of the grave, into the disciples' faces and then back to his Father. And he promised that if you trust him, he's got hold of you and you'll come back up too.

And that's good to know. Really, really good to know. So there you go - that's what the metaphor made me do. Don't ever let them tell you English isn't exciting...

The Metaphor Made Me Do It

This world is a mosaic of metaphors.

And I like pretentious opening sentences.

Anyone who knows me well will know that I love metaphors – in fact, they may possibly be a bit sick of me constantly going on about them – but there's a good reason for my obsession. Metaphors make something make more sense, they make your understanding of it richer and more vivid, by showing you something else that's a bit like it. (Yes, English Lit friends, it is more complicated than that, but go with me for now.) And actually, we pretty much rely on them for good communication, especially when we want to describe something that was somehow astounding or powerful or strange:

You should have seen her, she fought so hard, I was so proud

He just looked at me, and there was that fire in his eyes, you know?

You've got no idea, she was like a mother to me all those years

And yes, I know that last one was a simile, but technically a simile is a type of metaphor! Anyway, they're really useful because some things are just hard to communicate in precise, technical language – we need to paint pictures instead. And that's so much more true when it's something that actually invisible – a feeling for example – or when it's something that's difficult to understand, like when you teach some weird mathematical concept by visualising it. Or does anyone remember being taught how atoms 'want' a full ring of 8 electrons, or a multiple of 8, so they react with things to get that? For 5 years of Chemistry at my school we always talked about what atoms 'want' or don't 'want', because it's such a helpful metaphor that we barely even notice it's there. 

We need metaphors, because without a good metaphor, we can barely understand or communicate anything worth understanding or communicating! And what's more – and this is why I'm so thoroughly obsessed with them – even God needs metaphors. In fact, he especially needs them, because he is on such a fundamentally different level to everything else we know – being, of course, the Creator of everything else there is to know – that actually, if he didn't use some metaphors it would be pretty much impossible for us to really get much about him at all. I suppose in a sense he could give us a kind of point by point, precise philosophical explanation of his being – although there's probably a decent argument that even the most precise language is just a different kind of metaphor for him – but if it was all just bare, technical fact I think we'd struggle to know how we felt about him, how we related to him.

So because God loves to communicate with us, because he loves to relate to us, he loves metaphors. And the Bible is full of them, rich, complicated, powerful metaphors, or sometimes delightfully simple ones. But he doesn't stop there – the whole world is scattered with these beautiful rays of metaphorical light, these bits of existence that show us a new angle, that paint a new picture of what God is like or what it's like to follow him. And again, anyone who's spent a fair bit of time with me will know that once you start looking, I reckon you can see these all over the place – and I love 'em.

But sometimes it goes a step further. Sometimes I find myself realising that I could create a metaphor – that I could do something that would be a picture of something that's true about God – and that is an offer that it's pretty difficult for me to resist. I moved house and job for seven months once, mostly because of the metaphor. So I'm going to do a few little blogs now, about some of the things that the metaphor made me do. I hope you enjoy them.

To Be Continued...