So there I am, suspended horizontally face down in a harness, swaying in the wind several hundred feet above a precipitate cliff drop, as a voice behind me says, 'Three, two, one – go!'
And suddenly I am off – flying through the air, suspended by unseen wires above me, on what is claimed to be the world's fastest zip-wire, and also the longest in Europe.
On the day we are there, the staff (who are excellent) reckon we will get above 100 miles an hour, though speeds even faster than that are possible, depending on weather conditions. And what a ride it is. It's like flying – except without the reassurance of an aeroplane. The wind rushes past as we hurtle forward over a lake far below, the coast of Wales stretching away in the distance, the mountains of Snowdonia behind us. The experience is long enough to savour.
Then, all too soon, we are coming into land. The ground seems to rush up, and although I am slowing, I feel as if I am speeding up as the touchdown site rushes closer towards me. I come to a halt and my trip is over.
I would like to pretend I was there purely for the purposes of spiritual research and growth. In fact, it turned out that we had unknowingly booked holiday accommodation about half a mile away. And when you find something like this on your doorstep, well, it just has to be done, doesn't it. But it did strike me afterwards there were some real spiritual lessons and parallels, and here they are:
1. You have to surrender control. When you get kitted out in the jumpsuit and harness and then lie down to be attached to the zip-wire above you, there are no two ways about it: you have to surrender control – completely – to the instructors. And you have to do this even though you cannot see what they are doing as they hook you up to the wire.
This is a pretty exact parallel of the Christian life. It is, in essence, all about surrender – completely – to Christ. As the devotional writer Paul Tripp has written in Lost in the Middle, 'We find it hard to rest under the control of another person. But that is exactly what God's story calls us to do: to surrender control to Another.' Ole Hallesby, in his classic Prayer, called the same concept 'helplessness'. He wrote that we have to 'surrender to a God whose ways are past finding out' and likened the experience to an infant in its mother's arms who is totally dependent upon her.
2. You have to follow the instructions. As we watched people before us coming down the zip-wire, we saw some people would stick out their arms wide, like an aeroplane. We assumed this was just their way of having fun! But it wasn't. A complex series of computer calculations including our weight and the day's wind speed meant the staff were able to predict how fast each of us would be going at as we came to the other end. And if some people were projected to be going above a certain speed, they were instructed to hold their arms out above a particular point on the ground as they passed over it in order to slow themselves down.
And so it is for us as Christians. We have to trust the instructions we are given about how to live as disciples. We have to do them, for our own safety, even if we don't fully understand them. Some of God's ethical and moral commands may seem a bit pointless – or even distract from our fun – but we trust that ultimately they are for our own good.
3. You cannot see your final destination, but you are told what will be there. When you get ready for the zip-wire at the top of it, you cannot see the landing point. This is not to do with how good your eyesight is, but is simply due to the fact that the end of the wire is so far away it simply cannot be glimpsed. But you are told that as you come into land someone will be there for you. And that someone, you are informed, will be holding up something for you to catch on to: rather wonderfully, for the purposes of spiritual parallels, it is a shepherd's crook.
I scarcely need to spell out the parallels with our final destination – death – and beyond. We cannot see what it will clearly be like, but we trust the Good Shepherd (Psalm 23) will be there to meet us.
Would it complete the parallels if I told you the name of the town in Wales next to which 'Zip World Velocity' is located? It is Bethesda – a place named after the site in Jerusalem where Jesus healed a man in John 5. It means something like 'House of Mercy'. As you hurtle through life, but surrender control to Christ, following his instructions, and trusting he will be there for you in death, may you too find that mercy, and rest in it.
David Baker is a former daily newspaper journalist now working as an Anglican minister in Sussex, England. Follow him on Twitter @Baker_David_A
