HOLD FAST

The secret to life is to undertake something bold enough to make you pause, and necessary enough to do it anyway.

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What is necessary is this compelling. That is, to transform.

Of our twenty-three homes gutted and renovated, our most overwhelming was the one we built on the top of a hillside. “Mountaintop,” we called it. Not only for its geographic disposition, but the feeling that this was a project akin to climbing the sheer face of a rocky cliff.

 “A tiger by the tail,” my brother had said when we announced we had purchased this wild piece of seemingly untameable land. And tame it, we did.

Though the project was ultimately breathtaking, the take-aways were not merely the tangibles of plastered walls and hand-hewn beams, but the invisible elements of transformation that had their way in both Ron and me.

Our mountaintop experience formed everything about who I am now. It taught me what something beyond what I thought possible, could manifest in and through me.

We are changed only to the extent that we are willing to sacrifice a piece of what we were once, only to the degree to which we are willing to give.  

 I do not discount that every seemingly impossible renovation has prepared me for what I am now going through. Cancer, and its predictable unpredictability, is the kindred interior journey of the external restorative life I’ve lived.

If you asked me the most important aspect of renovating homes, I would answer without hesitation, “It’s the going through.”

There is no endeavor worth pursuing that isn’t infused with apprehension-inducing moments, generous with the elements of both good, and hard—

to live as if someone would want to write about it,

to scale a life of epic proportions regardless of the chronic nature of our humanness,

that is to doubt, hesitate, fear.

To begin. Then see it through.

Powerful in how rare a response to life this is.  

Holy Week. The antithesis of a simple life. The grit of an elevated vision made vivid, incomprehensibly real.

“I will finish what I started,” is the take-away I cling to. “No matter the cost.”

Life, if measured by this standard,  is a feat of endurance, of perseverance that reveals a beauty on an entirely different scale.

In and through it we discover what is possible. In and through it we learn just how far we are able to go.

Of all that Holy Week teaches, I am mesmerized by the frailty of the body juxtaposed to the power of the will.

This is the wonder of it—where “created in His image” is presented in a stark reality that incites us to look away.

Do. Not. Look. Away.

We see in His eyes a reflection of a determination we model when we push through, dig in deep.

Hold Fast. Hold Your Nerve. This is what I hear Him say.

There are those of us who beat and bloody their bodies for thrill. What if instead, like Him, we do it for purpose?

What would we make of our world if we did?

It’s His motivation that propelled him forward.

What is motivating you?

With each bold step not taken, the stagnancy moves in:

Rogue cells multiplying within us become a cancer if not released and manifested as our purpose in the world.

We avoid what we perceive will cause us to suffer, even if only for a little while.

But hope deferred [in the long view] makes the heart sick.

What hope have you deferred from your unwillingness?

The outcome of every hard moment is something glorious ahead.

His story affirms it.  

Yet even a Jesus-sized faith could not avoid the problem.

In fact, faith is unnecessary in a problem-free life.

Refusal to act depicts our faith as dead.  

In every surprising diagnosis, in every endeavor fraught with one challenge and then the next, the way forward is rarely running in the other direction. The rare thing, the human quality I find most breathtaking, is the ability to hold your nerve, to see the thing all the way through. And then to have the thing itself in all its triumphant glory, gaze back in awe at you.

NOTES:

Hold Fast. Tattooed on the sailor’s hand.

A call to arms. A depiction of commitment despite the excruciating suffering of pushing the body as far as it can go.

Have you let go of the line you swore to yourself you’d hold fast to?

Have you given up on a purpose you know is yours?

“The one thing faith cannot do is avoid the problem.”

To live is to confront challenges head-on. One step. And then the next.

This is precisely what our Master did. And through it all he modeled,

hold to your hope. Cling to it and never let go.

Hebrews 10:23—Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for He who promised is faithful.

More about my thoughts on Easter at Before And After