FAITH ON THE ROCK


You are nine hundred feet off the ground clinging to microscopic granite foot holds the soft rubber of your shoes bite but your eyes can't see. Crimson blood oozing out from under your finger nails is mixing with the white gymnastic chalk on your hands. The lactic acid in your calves burns the muscle like a branding iron. Your right leg starts trembling.

So intense in concentration are you that the wind gusts ripping at your t-shirt go unnoticed. Even the strong smell of pine in the spring wind from the forest below is not detected. The vehement life and death struggle is totally consuming.

You make a desperate lunge upward and grab a new hold on the sparkling white rock with your left hand. The pathetic cries of your voice are heard by your partner, but don't register in your own ears. Your partner's bull horn voice is shouting instructions, but you tune out. Your mind simply can't handle anything more in this nano second of terror. The spirit of fear starts to laugh like a mad man in an effort to break your concentration.

For just an instant you glance over your shoulder to rebuke fear. Suddenly your inner being is dialoguing with him, and your concentration shifts from climbing to not falling. Immediately you are aware of the burning pain in your over-pumped forearms. Your nostrils catch a whiff of your own perspiration in the wind gust. In an instant the possibility of falling to your death is realized and your mind is consumed. The spirit of fear raises his arms in victory.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

You begin to accelerate rapidly toward the boulder field nine hundred feet below. . .