Stumbles and Near Falls

This is another story I posted as a guest blogger on my friend's website. If you're looking for a good blog to read, you should check her's out. She's currently in the middle of a series on Gideon. Good stuff.

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Recently I experienced one of the scariest moments of my short career.

Part of my current job as a physical therapist involves working in a nursing home. I’ve been working with an elderly woman who had a stroke several months ago. She should have died, but her stubborn will kept her heart beating. The first couple of months were spent lying in bed, so when she came to us she was very weak and dependent on everyone to take care of her.
But with the help of physical, occupational, and speech therapies, she quickly began to make a comeback. Now, three months later, she is still quite dependent on others, but is able to sit up, transfer, and walk.

Actually, she doesn’t really walk.

She kind of springs out of her chair and takes off at a dead walk-sprint.

But her balance isn’t great and she is still weak. So I try to always have a hold of her gait belt when we’re doing stuff. That’s the purpose of the belt – I hold on so the patient doesn’t fall.
On this particular day we were walking. Or more accurately, she was speed walking and I was trying to hold onto her with one hand and pull her wheelchair behind me with the other. She eventually tired out and was ready to sit and rest for a few minutes. So I one-handedly reached down to lock the brakes on her wheelchair so she could sit safely.

That’s when things got scary. It happened before either one of us knew what was going on.
Which is usually how it goes. Older people don’t even realize they’re falling until they’re already on the ground.

Suddenly, my patient was taking a nose-dive forward. Straight down into her walker, which would only slightly break her fall before she hit the hard floor. Thank goodness for my hand on her belt. I yanked her backwards from behind her wheelchair and she just barely landed in her seat. Thank goodness for locked brakes.

She was (understandably) startled and began crying out that she couldn’t get herself back into her chair. So I did my best to lift her up far enough into the seat so she could get herself in the rest of the way.

I sat down as well.

This woman also has severe short-term memory deficits. So after a few breaths she asks, “Where do you want me to go?” I’m pretty sure she had already forgotten about her near-smack experience with the floor.

I said, “Let’s just rest here for a few more minutes.” I still needed to sit.

After a while we both got up and finished our walk and all was well. But had I let go of that belt for just the brief second I needed to reach across to the brake, the story would have ended differently. Badly.

What if God let go of us every time we fell? What if He turned His back on us every once in a while and missed catching us?

Our spiritual growth is sequential. As baby Christians, God often holds us and carries us so we can see and experience Him up close. As we grow, we learn to walk on our spiritual legs. But the difference with our spiritual mobility compared to physical mobility is that we never walk independently. No matter how “big” we get, we still need God to hold onto us. For when we stumble.

That’s a promise. We will stumble. No matter how much of a spiritual giant someone may appear, even they will stumble. And even fall.

Sometimes it hurts. We might stub a toe or bump a knee. Sometimes we fall and we are wounded so badly we’re not sure we are ever going to be able to walk again. But God always has His hand on us. We never fall so hard that He can’t break our fall.

“If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast” (Psalm 139:9-10).

There is no place we can go where God isn’t holding onto us.

And maybe we should embrace a lack of short-term memory. Sometimes it’s ok to sit down, take a break, and recover a bit. But it does no good to sit and dwell on our mistakes and punish ourselves repeatedly for stumbling. Maybe we should be more like my patient – forget about the near disaster we just about landed in and ask instead, “Where do you want me to go?”
Our destination won’t come to us. We have to walk to it. Even if it’s one baby step at a time.