by James Baker
It’s not for the squeamish, but if you want to feel better about your own circumstances, go watch 127 Hours. For those not familiar with Aron Ralston, the protagonist of the film (played by James Franco), he is the true life wild-eyed and nervy adventurer who had his arm pinned to a rock face by a dislodged boulder while climbing through Blue John Canyon, Utah in 2003. I’ll spare you the gory details (the broad description is bad enough), but Aron frees himself by breaking the bones in his forearm and severing it with a dull multi-tool penknife. As the closing credits rolled, the thought occurred to me that my overdue oil change sticker didn’t seem quite so pressing.
I thought about Aron’s agony, his impossible decision. “Do I live? Or do I stay intact?” Amputation certainly wasn’t his first choice, and became viable only after five days of rigging various ropes, slings, and pulleys. Five days of pushing, tugging against, chipping on, and screaming at the rock. You see the resignation in his eyes when he realizes the price of survival. I wondered if I would do the same. Perhaps a better question is, will I do the same? As Christ followers, we might not be called to sacrifice a limb – but make no mistake, there is a cost to the life we’ve chosen.
And if your hand – even your stronger hand – causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. – Matthew 5:30
My dilemma is, I want to be rid of sin, but I don’t want the pain of extraction. I have reached a point in my life that, by and large, I have become repulsed by my own wretchedness. I hate that I get jealous. I hate that I tend to wallow in self-pity. I hate that I’ve screened my wife’s phone calls because I’m not ready to reconcile last night’s argument. I hate that I hate. Unfortunately, I don’t hate the familiar comforts of a boat that would rather not be rocked.
The putting off of our old life is messy. It’s ragged. It’s removing splinters with hedge trimmers, using a chain to stitch the wound. But here’s the obvious truth that constantly eludes me: Of course it will be difficult. If it were easy – if it were clean and tidy – I don’t believe God would have used such violent imagery. He’s not asking us to shed excess pounds, or get a haircut. He’s asking us to give up something we consider essential. For me, the questions become very simple. What do I love most? Myself? My routine? My seemingly innocuous sin that surely doesn’t affect me like it does the other 6.8 billion people on earth? Or am I willing to sacrifice the soft life, in order to find real life?
These days, Aron Ralston does not pass the time with Sudoku puzzles and Judge Judy, lamenting a life that could have been. Post accident, he has scaled Denali. Mt. Kilimanjaro, too. In 2005, he became the first man to have ascended all 54 of Colorado’s 14,000 ft. peaks….by himself….all in the winter. Would he like to have his arm back? Sure. Would he want it back if it meant withering away in a desolate canyon? I assume not.
After his ordeal, Ralston was quoted as saying that there are times to take action, “…even if it means making a hard choice, or cutting out something and leaving it in the past.” There are things I want to leave in my past. I wonder, though, if I’m a little too squeamish.
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