rocks & trust

I took rock climbing this week with Scott, the same teacher who taught me to ice climb. He's a pretty good teacher. Last time I took his class I was the only girl. This time people joked that the class had more girls than any of them had ever seen together in one place in Summit County. Sad, but true. It's been awhile since I've gotten to hang with that many girls.

So last time, in Ice Climbing class, this big guy dropped me while I was climbing. It was on one of the first climbs of the second day. I didn't get hurt, but I was lucky that one of my ice picks held long enough for him to start paying attention and take up the slack in the rope or I might've been. This scared me a lot. I already didn't trust the rope or the belayer. After being dropped I climbed as if I didn't have a rope at all. I got so burned-out climbing that way and never got very far off the ground after this.

I realized my mistake and tried to correct it coming into this rock climbing class. Funny, I was only dropped once - every other time the person belaying me had done a wonderful job. Despite all my good experiences it was the one bad experience that has stuck with me over the past year and a half. (I haven't done any sort of climbing since then.) It was a lot harder to trust this time around. Did I mention I am also afraid of heights? Not terribly afraid. Just enough that see-through bridges and any kind of grill or screen that has to be walked over is a cheep thrill. (I fell through one of those once which makes them quite scary, but that's another story.) Those bad experiences just stick with us despite whatever good we've known.

One girl in my class had a much higher than average fear of heights. She also has a fear of ropes because her uncle hung himself a year ago. We started the day off with rappelling and she ended up crying and rocking back and forth with her face in her knees. I tried to encourage her but it didn't look good. Amazingly though, after Scott worked with her one-on-one she did end up climbing a couple of the faces we ended up climbing. She was never quite able to rappel or allow herself to be lowered in anyway opting instead to walk off the tops of what she climbed. I've got say I was pretty impressed. I think I'm going to remember her for the rest of my life. There are things that get me scared enough that I feel like curling in a ball and crying. I frequently back down. God's been speaking to me a lot about growing a backbone lately. There's a lot of areas in my life where I've been seeing I need more courage.

Her example actually proved helpful for me. I think after her I was definitely the most afraid of heights, and afraid that my belayer wouldn't catch me. Grrrrr.... Rappelling was cool and fun, though very, very hard - especially those first few steps. My real problems arose after I'd climbed whatever it was I needed to climb. At this point I had to let go of the rock, lean back into the rappelling position (For those of you who don't know when you rappel you lean back till you are nearly parallel to the ground, from this position it's impossible to make a mad grab for the safety of the rock if you get dropped.), and trust the person belaying me to lower me back to the ground. This not only scares me, it completely freaks me out. I'm not one who easily trusts the people around me to begin with. Embarrassingly, the teacher had to climb up beside me and gently talk me through this step.

This is very parallel to real life for me. You could say I've been dropped. I've been dropped a lot. I have a very hard time really trusting people. Often I have a very hard time trusting God. I'm always waiting to be let down, abandoned, dropped. I've tried very hard to be one of those people who is completely independent, or as independent as is possible. Even when I am open usually it's because I've been gossiped about enough that I really could care less. Last year in ice climbing class I noticed that those who made it to the top of the hard stuff did so because the trusted that if they fell they would be caught.

This is my second long post this week. My apologies. Almost done. Anyway I was determined to learn to trust the rope this weekend. At first I was pitiful. Then I learned a trick that eventually made me take great strides towards accomplishing my goal. Stupid as it sounds the only thing that made it tolerable for me to be lowered was to ask the person belaying me to just hold me for a minute while I leaned back, let go of the rope, let my arms fall back, and forced myself to relax for a moment. For some reason after this I was completely fine. After making people do this for me on every climb I did pretty well. I even managed to climb something people much better than me struggled with and not everyone could do it. Learning to trust the rope and belayer when I had no control allowed me to take the kind of risky moves that were necessary to take me to the top. It was one of those climbs that just didn't have safe, easy hand and foot holds. Sometimes it hardly had anything at all. Without trust I never could have taken the risks or jumped for hard-to-reach holds.

I've been praying a lot this summer for God to teach me a deeper trust. I hope somehow what I learned in rock class this weekend will get applied to the rest of my life. We'll see...