God has got the rope
When I walked into Church last week, I didn’t expect to walk out buoyed by a calm wave of relief.
~~~
At quarter to 11 on Sunday, we turned into Austin Ridge Bible Church.
A stream of cars was spilling out of the parking garage as we descended down the ramp of the multi-level structure and wedged into a lucky spot.
After climbing a set of stairs and emerging into daylight, I lifted my gaze to the Church in quiet awe. It looked more like a cutting-edge sports complex or a brand new business school at an eager university, than a community chapel. Proud pillars of concrete replaced hand-chiseled stones. Wide sheets of glass, glowing with reflected gold, replaced windowed images of Christ, stained with colored light.
An expanse of landscaped lawn, baking in the dry Texas heat, started at the road and ran toward the front entrance for a quarter of a mile, jumping over clusters of shimmering saplings and mulch beds and armor stone benches and pristine cement sidewalks the color of warm sand. Finally when the lawn reached the Church it stopped in its tracks, as if politely enamored by the modern engineering.
Outside the front doors, the air was alive with impassioned conversation—flavored with fondness, broken up every few seconds to greet another passerby. Hands shook and fists bumped and one-armed hugs with three pats on the back for good measure. People, standing straight and stooped low, chatting in the weightless sunshine with that sense of infinite hope reserved for early weekend mornings.
I was immediately welcomed like an old friend who’d come home. For five minutes, I spoke to Tom, a gangly, cheery man in his mid 50’s, with a faint gray handlebar mustache, who grew up in Wisconsin but met his wife in Texas. He called himself a Christian for five decades but never knew what the Bible actually said until he started attending Austin Ridge 1 ½ years ago. Sunday morning is the best part of his week. This Church changed his life.
We walked through the entrance into an open communal space, blooming with light, with ceilings that stretched to the sky and concrete floors a marble could roll across for miles, peppered with low dark leather couches and mahogany coffee tables. Groups of people swelled with new arrivals, merging and dissolving like breath, meeting each other with the familiar conviction of a kid returning to summer camp. An opera of voices filled the room, spilled with intimacy, tipped out with each warm word.
I stopped by a side table and grabbed a free black coffee, served out with a sense of fervent duty like hot chocolate on the Polar Express. Then I was led down the right entrance into the lower bowl of the auditorium.
There must have been a thousand seats. At 11 sharp, not a single one was empty.
The timer hit 0:00.
Everyone stood up in one restless motion as the shuffling of papers and the whap of foldable stadium chairs springing back into place crescendoed around the room. A lead singer, three backup vocalists, a drummer, and four guitarists sauntered on stage and began to play. Behind, three 30-foot screens projected lyrics. Everything filmed by a small army of studio cameras.
A Church with the operational efficiency of a Ford factory, the infrastructure of a university, the atmosphere of a concert, and the production value of an NFL game. Not what I was expecting.
After three songs, the pastor stepped on stage. Middle-aged, wire-rimmed glasses bridging his nose. A burnt yellow and dark brown plaid polo shirt, tucked crisply into blue jeans. The sermon was on the New Testament, Acts 4:23-31.1 Eight verses. Each read, explained, dissected, contextualized, connected. Bringing new life to an impossibly old text.
One part stood out that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“I remember when I used to work camps every summer in college,” the pastor started. “This one camp we did a lot of rock climbing. Most of the kids had never been rock climbing.”
“We got them harnessed in. After they reached the top of the wall, we're lowering these kids down. They’re afraid. Number one question every kid would ask: Do you have the rope?”
“You know what prayer is?”
He paused.
A breathless silence hung heavy as listeners leaned forward in their seats.
“God, do you have the rope?”
“There's struggle and there's heartache and there's pain. We're in a messed up place. But I also believe in a God who has the rope and you can trust him.”
“Can your God say to you, ‘I'm not going to tell you why. It's none of your business. Trust me.'
'I'm not going to tell you for a while. Trust me.'
'I'm not going to show you what you're asking me to show you. Trust me.’”
“I may not understand. I don't have to understand.”
“I may not like it. I don't have to like it.”
Another pause.
My jaw slackened and my shoulders softened as his words wove their way into my mind.
An audible “Amen!” lurched from the back.
“What I do need, God, is to know that you've got the other end of the rope. As long as you say you got me, I'm good. And historically, you've always held the rope.”
The whole way home, his final words reverberated.
“God you got the rope. I'm going to trust you.”
~~~
The more I think about it, it’s less a religious statement and more a statement of belief in the goodness of being. It’s a statement of belief that the world is not ordered randomly, carelessly, meaninglessly.
Humans share a devotional impulse. Everyone worships.
But how big is the thing that I worship? How big is my God?2 Is my God big enough that even when life is hard and uncertain and scary, I still trust that he’s got me? I’m in flight, falling through the sky, no clue where any of this is headed. Do I trust that I won’t hit the ground?
Recently, I haven’t trusted that God has got the rope.3
In hard times, I grip tighter. I put everything on my shoulders, like Atlas, and break beneath the weight. I want to “figure life out,” as if it’s a problem to be solved. I try to control each detail. Demand to know why. Why this? Why now? Why me?
It’s this needing to know that plants the pain.
But what I need, more than anything, is trust. Trust the trials and tribulations matter. Trust whatever happens or doesn’t happen, God has the rope. Trust that I won’t fall. That something has got me. That all the dots will connect looking back. That it’s all wrapped up in this beautiful (tastefully illustrated) storybook called life.
That it’s not my job to know why. My job is to trust. To put one foot in front of the other, to paraphrase Mary Oliver, all attentive to what presents itself continually.
And if I look back, life always has its curious way of working out. My past is proof. That I am always led to where I need to be. And that something knows, much better than I do, where that is. With parts that don’t yet make sense, that feel barren of God’s seeing hand, it’s because there isn’t enough distance. I’m too zoomed in to connect the dots. I’m too close to the pain to see the pleasure.
I want to live in a world where God has the rope. Where I don’t have to know, but I do have to trust. Where nothing is meaningless. Rather, rich meaning is revealed according to God’s time, not my ticking watch.
Thank you
andHaley Brengartner for your help on this piece and for being a friend.My essays are entirely funded by patrons. If you value my work and want to support it (and get some exclusive content), the best way is by taking out a paid subscription.
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👋 what i’ve been up to:
In Austin, I went to Church with David Perell, the CEO of Write of Passage.
Then I caught a bus to Houston to spend time with CJ Kirk. He’s a 4th Dan Black Belt in Krav Maga, a certified life & performance coach, owns multiple businesses (including multiple Krav gyms and a tactical shooting school) and is among the wisest men I’ve met.
I’m wrapping up work on Noah’s book launch. Million Dollar Weekend hit the NYT Bestseller List and is the #1 Entrepreneurship book on Amazon. (It’s bad for my ego, but it’s neat you can see my name in the Acknowledgements.)
✍️ quote i’m pondering:
Rainer Maria Rilke, my second favorite poet, on surrender:
“Let everything happen to you.
Beauty and terror.
Just keep going.
No feeling is final.”
📸 photo i took:
The Texas State Capitol in Downtown Austin is the city’s prettiest building and one of its oldest.
🎵 song i’m listening to:
Thank you for reading!
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You got all my love,
Tommy
The three Christians I've spoken to this week all echoed the importance of a Church sticking to scripture, studying the Bible, the word of God, instead of the individual offshoot opinions of one person.
This question is roughly equivalent to: How deep is my belief that the world is properly ordered and Being is good?
I’m still not sure what I mean when I say “God”. It’s a sense that hovers above my head—evades articulation and escapes logic. I don't understand how God connects to Christ. How a belief in a God differs from a belief in a trinitarian God. The difference between believing in God and being Christian. The separation between individual faith and organized religion. But I do know, when it comes to God, people are not all talking about the same thing.
Thank you for sharing this experience. I do not attend a church, so I don't get to experience or reflect on the skills that are demonstrated by inspired ministers in the realm of speaking and storytelling. As I relished the entirety of this piece I reached the last words of the final footnote. "But I do know, when it comes to God, people are not all talking about the same thing." And it struck me how incredibly ironic it is (and perhaps heartbreaking to God) that people throughout time have struck each other down for thinking and talking differently about God. May the "goodness of being" as you've called it, prevail in all of our searches.
Tommy -a beautiful and thought provoking essay.
“It’s this needing to know that plants the pain.”
This reminds me of the Buddhist maxim that we are the source of our own suffering.
Your essay brings to mind several things for me. First, is that “faith” if you leave religion aside, is “not knowing.” Getting comfortable, practicing “not knowing” and “trusting” strengthens one’s faith. Second, wanting to know, and trying to control, at their root, come from “fear”. Fear that something isn’t going to go the way you want. We attach ourselves to outcomes, and then try with our might to manifest that particular outcome. When we act with intention and let go of an exact outcome, trusting that the right one will manifest, we don’t suffer AND we are blown away by outcomes that are WAY better than the ones that we imagined and were trying to control for.
It’s easier for me at my age to see this, since I spent the first 40 years of my life acting from this place of fear and suffering, having things not turn out the way I’d hoped, only to see later why they didn’t and see why the outcome that came to pass was right. How did I know it was right? Because it was the one that occurred :)
Last, I’m a very spiritual person, and sometimes I think of God as “the universal connection” between us all. So many people get hung up on God they lose sight of the lesson in the sermon you wrote about. For the non-devout, Who has the Rope? Something much bigger than them, and the person at the other end. Something so big and inconceivable, something universal. To believe that requires faith, trust, and humility.
Im grateful to have a hand on your rope and that you have a hand on mine.
In the words of your brother Jack - much love to you.
(I wrote this in a parking lot and didn’t proof it. I hope there aren’t lots of errors.)