The last few weeks, I’ve felt God nudging me to not be so reliant on my safety nets forever. I’m healing. Sometimes it hard to believe and I know it may be hard to hear, for which I’m truly sorry, but I’m healing. My body is truly healing. This isn’t just another vain hope because of a new treatment or something. This is the real thing. This is documented and has been a continuing process over the last year. 

I’ve had a range of emotions throughout this healing, from guilt to grief to fear to excitement to confusion to things I can’t put into words. Of course, I did put a lot of it into words in my unreleased next book. 

One thing I’ve been begging God for is freedom from fear and guilt and grief and bitterness. I’m so tired of being trapped both physically and emotionally by the scars left from illness. As I’ve prayed about my future God has been laying people on my heart, but to serve them to my best ability, I need to be able to do things I can’t do while glued to safety nets.

Something that comes to mind is a scene in the book A Time to Die by Nadine Brandes. (Yep, we’re going back to the nerd-roots this blog was started with. Vague references and all.) In it, there’s one place where people get around by tightrope. The thing is, Parvin, the main character, doesn’t know how to walk on a tightrope, and she’s afraid to try. So while everyone else scurries around to do their shopping and such, Parvin takes the long way. She climbs down a ladder one-handed until she comes to the safety net. Then she painstakingly crawks across the safety net to the ladder on the other side. 

It was slow going. Everyone was watching. And it was painful. But hey, she was safe.

The circus is in town this week where I live. And of course, there are some ariel tricks. But you can’t fly through the air if you refuse to leave the safety net.

So the past few months, I’ve started to flap my wings. I’ve started to let myself fly a few steps and then find my footing again. And mostly, it’s been wonderfully amazing. But even though I’m flying, there’s always a safety net. Which is a great way to learn to fly again. I think it would be pretty idiotic to try to learn to fly without having a safety net.

The thing is, all this is just to build confidence for when there is no safety net at all. Now that’s a scary thought. But to fly to the places and reach the people God has called me to, I can’t always be glued to a safety net.

It doesn’t have to be a certain place, but once you have been blessed with healing, you have to have the courage to use it. You have to have the courage to stop taking that one supplement or move somewhere away from the doctor who saved your life or push your spoon levels to the max.

Flying means taking a risk. A calculated one, of course. And the risks worth taking are different for each of us. Not all of the risks need to be taken, and we should always know where the safety nets are in case we are to need them again, but still, to grow and fly the way God created us to there will be risks.

The good news is, God is the one safety net we’ll never have to let go of. He is the one tower of protection that won’t be a limitation to our service for Him or our growth. Instead, He is the one without whose protection and safety net we can’t grow at all.