Over The Edge

A man is walking along a cliff, and he suddenly goes over the edge of the cliff. This is very bad because what waits for him at the bottom of a very long, scary drop is almost-certain death. The man can't control his own descent, or what waits at the bottom, and there is nothing and no one to intercede between him and the unforgiving ground.

Going over the edge, in our culture, almost always refers to something bad, something that is not in our control. There's going over the edge of a cliff, like in this example, and one can also "go over the edge" as we use the phrase when referring to a person with an emotional handicap. It seems not too far, then, to assume that we, as a culture, think losing control to be one of the worst things that we can experience. After all, why strive to gain power if not for control of people and actions. Why try to accumulate wealth if not to be able to control the conditions in which we live? Why, even, make laws if not trying to preserve each person's control of their possessions and person?

Taking all this into account, it is fairly easy to predict how such a society would take the news that the being that created them wanted them to willingly give all their control of every aspect of their lives to him, for his control. If you want a mental picture, you don't have to go far past your front door.

Yet, this is what he asks, and it isn't quite the disaster we seem to imagine. First of all, we seem to forget that this isn't your average human pulling the strings. This is God. And every time we rebel against what he wants of us, we are saying that we know better. Take our cliff-walking man from earlier. Every time we shy from God's plan, we are imagining that man walking off the cliff. He is flying through the air waiting for whatever may come, and he sees a person coming in with some sort of flying craft to save him. He keeps falling, and the craft comes closer and- misses. The man crashes to the ground. This is what we imagine happening when we protest that God's plan is too difficult, or that it won't turn out right, or that it doesn't make any sense. We think that we see an inexperienced pilot in the cockpit, one that doesn't understand, or who will fumble the catch.

But that's not the case. The person in the cockpit has been around since before the beginning of time, and he is perfect, all-knowing, and completely loving. So his every plan will be based on all the knowledge in the universe, with a goal of making every thing in existence in perfect harmony with each other. Compared to this, our doubts that he won't be able to help us through a talk about him, or even a life-threatening situation is pretty pathetic.

And when we do give Him everything, he promises to use us for the perfection of the world, and to give us everything we need to live, and to be with us every moment of our lives and until the end of the age. He promises to love us more than we can comprehend forever, no matter what we do. He promises to forgive all our faults, and separate our sins from us as far as the east is from the west. And he promises that when we leave earth and go to him for good, he will have a house prepared for us to live in forever in His presence. Based on all this, we need to make it our mission for all of our days to give everything we do, every decision we make to Him for His inspection and approval, because He is far wiser and better than us. He says it perfectly in one of the best known verses in Christianity:

"Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths." (Proverbs 3:5-6 King James Bible)