Tethered
One of the most significant birthday gifts I ever
received came on my fifth birthday. It was
a kite. It was a simple model made of stiff
paper with balsa wood supports, and a stick wrapped with about 200 yards of
string. My brother Tom gave me the kite
and as soon as I opened it, Tom began the assembly. He had it quickly looking like a kite, then he
tied the string to the center where the supports crossed. Lastly, he tied together four or five narrow strips
of old shirts from my mother’s rag bag, gathered it together in his arms and
said simply, “Let’s go.”
My family moved to the westside outskirts of Green Bay
the previous May. I was about to begin
believing that the most important reason that we had moved wasn’t because it
was the opportunity that my parents had been waiting for their entire marriage
to own a brand-new home of their own, but rather so that I had the best
kite-flying field in the world. When we
moved there in 1962 we had few neighbors, and only one between our house and
the place where Murphy Drive just kind of stopped in apparent exhaustion. From there, it was farm fields that hadn’t
felt the plow in years as far as you could see, all the way to the end of my
world.
I followed Tom out the back door, through the neighbor’s
back yard and about fifty yards out into the open field. Tom handed me the ball of string; it was a
five-year-old’s equivalent of being handed the car keys. “Let’s get her up in the air,” Tom said as he
walked about thirty feet away with my kite.
He had positioned himself directly downwind from the steady breeze that
I could feel on my back. “Now, when I
tell you, I want you to hold the string up high and run that way,” said Tom
pointing behind me. “Right into the
wind.”
“Now!” he shouted and I began to run. I felt the pull of the kite and saw the
string rising up quickly behind me. I
turned to look over my shoulder. My kite
had climbed about twenty feet up and was kind of shimmying from side to
side. “You can stop running now. Loosen your grip on the stick and let some
more string out. Just let out a little
string at a time - let the kite take the string out. You have to keep the string tight, or the
kite will fall to the ground.” I learned
to loosen my grip just enough so that the stick turned in my hand. I was amazed at how fast the kite climbed as
the string played out. “That’s good for
now.”
The kite began to sort of dance – a slow sway as it
wagged its rag tail. I could feel the
weight of the wind as it made my arms bounce a bit with each stronger
puff. It could not have been more
magical to me than if that wind had unfurled the sails of a great ship. My mind could hear the heavy canvas snap
taught as the ship of my imagination began moving into the limitless ocean of
blue sky. After about fifteen minutes
Tom asked if I wanted to go back to the house for a piece of birthday cake, but
I told him that I just wanted to stay right there.
As Tom headed home I found a large rock to sit on. I could feel the muscles on the back of my
neck tighten from the strain of holding my head tilted backward so I could
watch the kite fly. But that was just a
small bother compared to the wonder I had discovered.
I think it’s much the same with God and us, or at
least with God and me. He’s most
content, even thrilled, when I climb higher, more than willing to let the
string play out a bit more from time to time.
But it is vital for me to stay tethered to His hands. Without His gentle force helping me lean into
life’s breezes, I would quickly plummet downward and crash into the ground. Oh, yes I believe that He could fix me even
then, but I don’t want to test it out. I
am quite content; I feel that God is too.
His Peace <><
Deacon Dan
Photo by Lucy Wolski on Unsplash
Comments
Post a Comment