When I fall

 You will lose hope. You will lose faith. You will lose love. Not all of them at once. But you will. If you get hit fast enough, hard enough and often enough, you will fall. Fall out of hope, fall out of faith, fall out of love. You will fall not just on your knees but flat on your face. It will feel like your lungs will never be able to breathe in air again and that you'll spiral out of control forever. It will feel like you forgot everything you knew by heart about God, about good or bad, about yourself. It will feel like your very soul is being crushed by some giant boot and you're being powerless to even get out of the way. If you read this now and you say to yourself, 'Never! Not me! I will follow The Lord to the death! He would never allow such a thing to happen to me because He loves me!', believe me, so did many others, including Peter when he swore that he would never deny Christ.

It's not a question of if it will happen, it's a question of when it will happen. And it will happen not because God can't protect you, or that He doesn't love you. It will happen because it has to. Every time I happen to take a face planter and I sit there all dazed and confused and I try to remember how to breathe, I remember a video I have seen of a mother bear and her cub climbing up a mountain.

If God's sole idea of love would entail keeping me safe from anything that might hurt me, then the moment I decide to follow Him, He would hurry up and put me in a glass cage to protect me from anything that might so much as scratch me. What a frail love that would prove to be.

But He knows the strength and potential there is in this small seed of truth that was placed in my heart the moment I first believed. He's not worried that I might misjudge His plans or love for me. He knows that He has to walk through tough terrains and unforgiving weather and if I am to follow after Him, I might end up in harsh, ruthless and dangerous situations. He knows that If He ends up climbing up a steep mountain I might not keep up. He knows that I might fall time and time again. He is aware that I might fall even to my own destruction. But He's not worried that I won't get back up. He knows that whatever He has placed inside me will pull me back up every time I fall. He knows that I have nothing else but Him. He knows there's nowhere else for me to be, but right there on His trail. There's no going back. Come hell or high water, I have to follow. Because if I keep going after Him, I just might learn to one day climb mountains by myself.

By Cristina Pop