Roller Coaster

So a couple of days ago I went to Six Flags.  I was peer pressured by my middle school friends that I hardly ever see, and therefore I couldn't say no even though I held a grudge against the theme park industry in general after serving up pizza for the masses of tourists that flow through the park gates every day last summer.  But being pulled in by the ties of friendship and the promise of a half-price ticket for going later in the day, I decided that maybe it was about time that Six Flags and I reconciled.

After all, we used to be friends...back in high school we got season passes that let us get in the park whenever we wanted to, meaning that we could go at obscure times to avoid the crowds and ride roller coasters all day long.  Many of my fondest memories are intertwined with the loops of the Batman and the up-and-down plunges of the Screamin' Eagle.  Even the pizza restaurant where I slaved away all last summer was once the site of a heated argument between my friend Ashley and I over the attractiveness of Orlando Bloom compared to Johnny Depp in the latest "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie, while our friend Nick simply ate his pizza and rolled his eyes.  

Back in the 10th grade, I could tell you everything about that Six Flags inside and out, with detailed accounts of the tracks of each and every ride in the park.

But then we stopped getting season passes, meaning that anytime we wanted to taste the thrills of a wooden roller coaster or get soaked on Thunder River, we would have to pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $45, besides the $15 to park and $20 we inevitably ended up spending on ice cream cones and turkey legs and frozen lemonade once inside.  Needless to say, we stopped going to Six Flags about the time we stopped getting season passes.  Three or four years later, being employed by the park basically killed whatever fond memories of Six Flags I had left, and I only associated it with rude customers, long hours, and bitter supervisors.  And neon yellow synthetic polo shirts.

Despite all of this, I passed through the turnstiles of the park gates on Friday night with a tinge of excitement about me.  I walked past all the places I worked and celebrated the fact that I was NOT working there, and went on with my friends to ride some rides.  We hit up some old favorites, like the Mine Train and the Rush Street Flyer and the Boss, before riding a couple roller coasters that had been built since my last escapades through the park 4+ years ago.  

By the time we got to our last roller coaster of the night, the enthusiastically named "Evil Knievel" coaster, the sun had gone down completely.  Having never ridden the ride before, I was excited for the unpredictable turns to be made even more thrilling by the dark.  I wasn't disappointed: the cars shot out of the gate and began the twists and turns and rises and falls of your standard roller coaster, and since I couldn't see any of it coming in front of me the intensity of the ride went up about 10 bajillion points.  Every time I thought the ride was over, the train jerked around another corner and twisted back away from the platform to fly around the curves once more.  When the ride finally came to a stop, we walked out of the park all giddy and hyped up on the adrenaline that a day at an amusement park will leave you with.

We naturally followed this endeavor with Steak and Shake and dares to eat their mysterious green peppers, because that is just what you do after going to Six Flags.  But that's a whole other conversation, and would get me off the train of my thought, so we're not going to talk about that.

Anyway, after what was the most fun night I've had in a long time, I returned back home to face reality again.  I'm getting ready to move to Texas in a couple weeks and go to Mexico in the meantime, and having just gotten back from Kansas City last Monday, this has meant that I'm essentially deconstructing everything about my life at present and packing it into boxes to reconstruct it 10 hours from home (and 17+ hours from my Kentucky home).

And it has been STRESSING

ME 

OUT.

Lately, I've felt like my life is just one transition after another.  I transitioned out of undergraduate college.  I transitioned to an internship across the state.  I transitioned out of the idea that I'd be completing seminary in Kentucky next year to follow a full-tuition scholarship to Texas.  I transitioned out of that internship back home.  And now I'm transitioning to graduate school and apartment rent and basically the full-fledged world of being an adult.  In less than two weeks, I'm moving to Texas with no job and no apartment yet secured.  All of these easily understandable stressors keep combining with goodbye-get-togethers with childhood friends before we all move across the country to begin the rest of our lives.  It's been crazy.

You might say that I'm on a roller coaster myself.  It's cliche, but you could say it.  One second I'm on the highest height out with my family or friends socializing and having fun, and the next I'm plunging back into the overwhelming reality that I'm leaving everything behind in a matter of days.  And even though I'm bound to fly back up to the top again, there's still that moment of fear where you wonder if the train is going to fly off the track.

So I started wondering....why do I even like roller coasters?  Or rather, why do I love and thrive off the uncertainty of flying across a rickety wooden roller coaster in total darkness, but freak out about the uncertainty of life in general?

This got me thinking.

I mean, have you ever stopped and thought about roller coasters?  I've never been totally convinced that a padded lap bar is enough to keep me from flying out of the car, but I get on the thing anyway.  And after waiting in line for 30 minutes or more to get on this death trap, I sit in a metal car, strap a seat belt across me if I'm lucky, press a lap bar down across my legs and trust that the 0.2 second tap of a teenager passes as a sufficient "safety check", and then I allow this train of metal to carry me at gut-wrenching speeds across a labyrinth of wooden beams.  And then it's over, and I'm all excited by the thrill, and go find another one to get in line for, and start the whole thing over again.

And then there's the real world, where I profess to live a life by a trust in a God that has the whole plan of my life, your life, and everyone else's life worked out exactly how it should work out.  And furthermore, this God has been keeping the universe in line for thousands of years before I was born.  This God also nudged my mind and heart into the path of a ministry career, and dropped a full tuition graduate education into my lap to get me into a place that He very clearly wants me to be.  But I'm still all stressed out by the change, because I can't see exactly where I'm going.  I mean, I can see the school and the degree, but I can't see the apartment and the job and the friends and the certainty that the life I'll build in Texas will be as good as the one I built in Kentucky and the one that I've built in St. Louis over the years.

I'd love to say that I trust God more than I trust the wood and nails that make up that roller coaster I willingly paid to climb into, but the fact of the matter is that a lot of the time, I don't.  I know that it doesn't make any sense.  I feel like that's human nature though; we like to know what's going on.  Maybe the reason people are so willing to get into roller coasters are because they know that they'll end up in exactly the same place when they're finished.  It's a wild and crazy and upredictable ride that leads to a very predictable conclusion.

But doesn't the Bible say that surely God knows the plans He has for us?  Plans for our welfare and not for harm?  Why are some risks easy to take, and other risks completely overwhelming?  

I think lots of times people want to believe that putting your faith in God will make everything easier in your life.  You get all the televangelist preachers telling you that God wants you rich and comfortable, and that nothing will ever be difficult.  Or maybe people want to think that God only loves them if everything is always easy, and if things get hard it means that God's abandoned them.  

But life with God is a roller coaster.  It's not a passenger train.  It  has ups and downs, and unpredictable turns, and all of it winds around in and out of itself in ways that only make sense to its Designer.  We can't see where we're going, but it doesn't matter because it's been laid out for us ahead of time.  And when the roller coaster finally comes to a stop, I believe that I'll get off where my life started: with God.  

So why should I worry about all the turns in the meantime?  Why shouldn't I be more excited then scared?  I'll pay $30 to get into a park and ride roller coasters for a couple of hours...maybe I should strap myself into God's plan for my life, uncover my eyes, and throw my hands in the air trusting that God won't let me fly off.   

And the best part is, God doesn't even make me wait in line.