Count Your Blessings #61 – Hanging On

I seem to spend a good deal of my life in a state that can best be described as hanging on. Sometimes I’m hanging-on for the ride, other times I’m hanging-on with gritted determination desperate to not let go.

Climbing Helvellyn bought this home to me again, in a couple of ways.

I am no longer a mountain goat, I’m not sure I ever was, climbing is now something that requires a good deal of determination. Jonathan, on the other hand is a slim young man who wasn’t out of breath the whole way up.

For much of the initial climb I was talking to myself; “Just hang in on it will get better soon”; “One more step and then rest”; “Four steps up is another metre climbed, and there’s only 800 of them”. I was hanging-on determined to reach the summit even though my body was telling me the opposite.

There are a number of routes up Helvellyn. Striding Edge is the famous one because it is a long sharp ridge with steep falls on either side. In places they are sheer cliffs. for most of it the path is only just wide enough to walk on, and it’s all rocks. Part way along the ridge, with the mountain goat in front, I stepped from one set of rocks to another. Unfortunately my back foot became wedged in between the two rocks where I had placed it on my previous step. With my body weight moving forward and my foot staying put I lost balance and fell over. Because my step was slightly sideways I didn’t fall flat onto the path I fell off the path onto a steep hillside which didn’t stop until Red Tarn some 200 metres below. it was one of those slow motion moments. I was no longer thinking about the aches of walking up I was thinking “it doesn’t matter how much it hurts just hang-on to something”. As it happens I fell onto some rocky grass, clung on and stopped. Jonathan had stopped to talk to a man making his way down and they both came over to make sure I was OK.

I now have a scratch on my face, a graze on my hand and a bruise on my knee but apart from that I am completely fine. A few metres either way and I would have fallen onto some very sharp rocks. If I’d been moving any faster I could so easily have ended up a lot closer to Red Tarn, and a lot more damaged. If I had fallen the other side I would have fallen straight down a cliff.

The top, as with all mountain peaks, was a time of elation. Restrained English elation, but elation all the same. Sometimes hanging-on is all you can do, sometimes hanging-on is all you need to do.

That is why we have a great High Priest who has gone to heaven, Jesus the Son of God. Let us cling to him and never stop trusting him. This High Priest of ours understands our weaknesses, for he faced all of the same temptations we do, yet he did not sin.

Hebrews 4:14–15