Falling hard: How the wingless learn to fly
- Katy Hollamby
- Oct 11, 2022
- 7 min read
Why do you think it is us humans are so obsessed with flight? I mean, who hasn’t imagined having that particular super power?
Is it the weightlessness maybe? Immunity to the annoyances of the ground far below? Complete freedom to go where we want, wherever the wind or our dreams take us?
Learning to fly
In February this year I was writing a story in the back room of my brain. The story of a girl who is taught by a beautiful stranger to fly. She starts on the ground, afraid, and she tries and tries but she is constantly held back by fear. Despite the challenges, even more than that because of the challenges, she learns to trust him, to let go, and to fly.
This was my story you see. For years I was walking, afraid, and then I got chronically ill. I was stuck in my fear then, unable to move on, unable to ignore it. But then I met that beautiful stranger there and he began to change my world, to release me from the things that had held me back: fear of failure, the pull of perfectionism and the deep gut-feeling that I had to offer something to be of value. With Him in that new secret place there was no pressure to perform. The overwhelm and exhaustion that had long chased me receded below me and I had a taste of living without fear and you know, it really did feel like flying.
So I began to write the book. The story of a girl who learns to fly.
In March of this year I was standing in an auditorium of people all singing to God with the passion of a football stadium and the joy of an escaped convict. I wasn’t just sharing the excitement of being with people after covid though, I was rejoicing in all God had done for me for the past four years. In that moment the illness seemed worth it. So much difficulty and struggle, but hadn’t he given me so much through it? I was out the other side. When all the sorrow is made right and we can see what God was doing all along. I would never be afraid again because I had overcome. Flying. Right?
And then I got sick again. Really sick. Back to the beginning sick.
This time I had already done all the deep diving and world shifting, so surely it was easier?
Well no, because now there was no “silver lining.” I had checked off all the “lessons of the season” and now I was just ill.
It felt like I fell out of the sky.
Fear returned in all its raging, along with the other feelings you can imagine, disappointment like a poison. All that learning and growing, all that discovery and hope, all those moments of magic and connection all felt pointless. Weren’t they supposed to justify my illness? Weren’t they supposed to mean something?
I felt like everything I’d ever learned was a sham. This didn’t feel like overcoming and rising from the ashes. Wasn’t learning to live without fear supposed to mean I wasn’t afraid?
“Meaningless! meaningless!
Utterly meaningless, says the Teacher.
Everything is meaningless!
…
I have seen all things that are done under the sun;
all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”
Ecclesiastes 1: 2 & 14
Kicking out, she tore herself out of his arms on to the mud. Rain hammered in the puddle around her sodden jeans. She looked up at Him through a tangle of hair and snot and disappointment. Above her, the sky rang with its emptiness and something inside her snapped. She threw herself at him. As hard as she possibly could. Her forehead slammed into his chest and his feet stumbled back momentarily under the impact.
“This was you!” she screamed into him, fists pounding like rocks against his shoulders. “This is your fault! You made me fall.
“Everything listens to you! Everything!”
She grabbed fistfuls of his jumper.
“I’ve seen you. The wind and the rain, the water, the earth, even the trees! They listen to you!” Her lungs strained against her rib cage. It hurt. Oh how it hurt.
She closed her eyes and a lonely sob escaped.
“You did this.” She said it so quietly it was almost to herself.
“You did this to me.”
And suddenly it was too much. Her whole body folded in on itself like paper, as if the weight of those words had pulled her to the ground.
“Why didn’t you stop it? Why didn’t you keep me in the sky?
"Don’t you want me to fly?”
A terrible ache began to spread from her belly, coiling steadily outwards and hurting so much she contracted into a ball. Only one hand remained outstretched, clinging to the fabric of his trouser leg.
“You did this to me,” she whispered. “You let this happen.”
Let down
“Let down” is an interesting phrase isn’t it? To be let down. It’s one of the rawest pains in the human experience isn’t it? To be flying, to have those expectations, hope so ripe and thick and real, and to loose them. To fall from the sky. To have God let you fall down. Let you down.
So what do we do then?
Does the girl never learn to fly? Does she need to learn another lesson? Is is her fault for wanting to fly in the first place?
I sat in this place for months. With the girl in my story in the mud. No ending. No idea how to lift her up.
Slowly, the rage receded and I entered a dense confusion, fog-thick and heavy. But in time, soft as a dawn light, a new story began to emerge.
Flight. In the story the world tells us, it is a skill we learn. We learn to fly. To stop being afraid, and then we are somehow elevated, removed from life’s cares, and lifted high. We have complete freedom. More permanent joy. We become our #bestselves. Then we live in some elevated state of peace or happiness or whatever you want to call it.
Sometimes the church teaches us a similar story, that our disappointments and trials are worth it because we are learning a Dora-the-explorer lesson and once we have discovered the answer we will have our challenging circumstances removed.
Neither of these are helpful when you are sick with no recovery in sight.
But what if a permanent state of elevation is not what God has for us at all. What if the intention was never to teach us to fly, but to fall?
The wind was still streaming through her hair, sending it up like a parachute’s strings while she fell, down and down, but something else was happening now. Something unexpected. She opened her eyes. No she hadn’t imagined it. She was slowing down.
The girl could see for miles from here. Her chest swelled with the joy of being so high, of the world laid out below her like a map. She slid her arms through the air around her and felt the air pour past them, deliciously cool. For a moment she closed her eyes, smiling into the sun and then reopened them to focus on the one far below her, shielding His face from the light. He was watching her with such a huge grin that she laughed out loud.
Twisting onto her back she rolled through the air like an unfurling ribbon. Moments later she landed. Not a crash landing this time. But in his arms all the same.
Learning to Fall
Perhaps the way to live without fear is not to conquer the skies. To fly high away from the noise and the pain of the ground in a permanent state of happiness.
Perhaps the point is not that God lets us go through difficult things so that we can reach unreachable heights. Maybe suffering is not designed to teach us to climb higher so that we can become immune to pain. Perhaps in that sense it really is meaningless.
For what is the use of flight if only to take me off on my own? Where is the joy if we do not share it, or the success if it just takes me higher and higher? What is it I want - lofty cloud dwellings that induce envy in other people? A state of perfect balance where nothing and no one can affect me?
“That too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
…
‘I denied myself nothing my eyes desired;
I refused my heart no pleasure.
My heart took delight in all my labour,
And this was the reward for all my toil.
Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done
And what I had toiled to achieve,
Everything was meaningless,
A chasing after the wind;
Nothing was gained under the sun.”
Ecclesiastes 2:1 & 10-11
Meaningless and fleeting. These things, these flights and the joys that come with them, success and freedom and growth and inspiration and adventure - all good, all given, and all on their own meaningless, because none of them can possibly hope to last.
But there is one who will. There is one who will outlast us all.
The flight is not our promise. He is our promise.
Why does it still surprise me that the end of the journey is home? That each fall can have moments of flight but ultimately all that matters is that it ends in his arms.
Sometimes we step of the edge of a cliff and the plummet is terrifying and it all seems to go wrong. Other times it is beautiful and lazy and we feel every second of surrender. Sometimes we soar into the air as we fall, weightless for a moment of utter delight. We cannot know what the fall will be like, but what we can know is, He is with us, watching and delighting in us, arms open, waiting to receive us closer and closer still.
Let me down Jesus? Did you let me down?
Yes. You always let me come further down. No matter how far the fall, I can be brave and let go again, because though I may plummet or I may soar, I know it will end with you.
“We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.”
2 Corinthians 4:8-10
In the presence of Jesus, my mess is turned into miracles, my weakness is strength. It is the presence of Jesus that transforms death into life. That hides magic even in the darkest places. It is Jesus that turns the inevitable, human experience of falling, into intimacy, into joy and into flight.
Katy x
I completely love hearing from you, its so encouraging when you engage with the ideas I'm sharing. Please do leave me a comment or send me a message.
Feel free to post or share around too.
For more on disappointment, check this one out.
For more on making it through storms, try this one: https://www.katyhollamby.com/post/the-storm-inside
© Words, images and audio, Katy Hollamby 2022
Comments