Jump

“Remain in me, and I will remain in you. For a branch cannot produce fruit if it is severed from the vine, and you cannot be fruitful unless you remain in me.” John 15:4

There is one thing that I am absolutely sure I never want to do and that is jump out of a perfectly good airplane. Just getting on airplanes causes anxiety to well up within me. I have never been able to understand why people would want to jump out of them. But if you are brave enough to take that leap, there are two ways you can do it: solo or tandem. If, for some insane reason, I am called to jump out of an airplane, I would want it to be tandem.

In a tandem jump you are literally strapped to your instructor. Whatever the instructor does, you do. If he stays in the plane, you stay in the plane. But when the instructor gets ready to jump, you are going with him. While the thought of being strapped to another human being while the ground races toward me doesn’t do much to calm my fears, at least I can take comfort in the fact that the instructor knows what he is doing. He has jumped thousands of times. He is not at all afraid. To him, this is just another day at the office. 

Life can be a little like jumping out of an airplane. And if I’m going to jump, I want to be strapped to my Instructor. Jesus says “a branch cannot produce fruit if it is severed from the vine, and you cannot be fruitful unless you remain in me.” My desire is to “remain in him.” If I remain in Him, I am going where Jesus, my instructor, is going. If He wants me to take a bold leap of faith, I can jump because I take comfort in knowing that I am strapped to Him and He is not afraid at all. To him, this life of faith is just another day at the office.