Your faith is lost the second you tighten your grip on your purpose instead of trusting the plan.
The service ended over an hour ago. The lot is empty. Mine is the last car, and I still haven’t turned the key.
I am not praying. I am not crying. I am just sitting there with both hands on the wheel like the wheel might drive off without me. And I am thinking about a rope.
Because that is how I have come to see it. Every relationship you have ever been in is held together by a rope. Husband and wife. Father and son. Mother and daughter. Best friends. Business partners. The employer and the one who clocks in. The bandmates, the teammates, the collaborators, the ones you came up with. Every single one of them is a rope laid across two necks. Yours and theirs.
And here is the only question that has ever mattered about that rope. Who is holding it?
The Rope Was Never Yours to Hold
You feel it move. That is what starts it. You feel the rope shift against your neck, just slightly, and something in you panics. You reach up. You grab it. You try to yank it off, or you clamp down on it so it can’t move again without your say-so.
And the moment you grip it, it tightens. Not just on them. On you.
That is the part nobody tells you. When you seize the rope in a marriage, in a partnership, in a friendship, you are not protecting your neck. You are choking two people at once. Yours and the person on the other end. The harder you pull for control, the less air either of you gets.
There is only one hand that was ever meant to hold that rope. Not yours. Not theirs. God’s. He is the only one who can hold it without strangling anybody, because He is the only one who can see both necks at the same time and love them both completely. The second you or I try to take that job from Him, we prove we don’t trust the One who was already doing it right.
Solomon wrote it plainly three thousand years ago. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight.” Lean not on your own understanding. That is not a poem. That is a set of instructions for your hands. Take them off the rope.
Faith Is a Choice, Which Means It Can Be Lost
Here is what I keep coming back to. Faith was not installed in us at birth like a heartbeat. Faith is a choice. And anything that is a choice can be un-chosen, even for a single second.
That is the whole game. You don’t lose faith in some dramatic collapse where you renounce God on a mountaintop. You lose it in a flicker. A text left on read. A partner who goes quiet. A number that doesn’t add up. For one split second you stop trusting the person on the other end of the rope, and in that same second you stop trusting the God who tied you to them. So your hand shoots up and you grab.
We suspect the worst. And then, God help us, we let the worst play out in our heads until we are living inside a story that never actually happened. We tighten the rope around a neck for a crime that was only ever committed in our imagination.
Tonight I can tell you I lived the trust. I really did. But I would be lying to you and to God if I said my grip never tightens. It does. And I have to confess where it came from.
The Three Days That Taught Me to Let Go
Last year I lost three businesses. Back to back. Inside of two, maybe three days.
Sit with how absurd that is. Three separate operations, three separate stories, three sets of circumstances that had nothing to do with each other. And they all came apart in the same seventy-two hours. My mind did the only math it knew how to do. This cannot be a coincidence. Something is coming for me.
So I gripped. I lost my trust, and my hands flew to every rope I could reach. I tried to control outcomes that were never mine to control. I tightened, and I choked, and for a stretch there I could barely breathe.
It did not last long. Because the grip never does what you think it will. It doesn’t save the thing. It just steals your air.
And slowly, the way it always happens, I saw it. Three businesses did not fall in three days by accident. They fell because they were three walls of a room I was not supposed to stay in. It was a demolition, and I had mistaken it for an attack. It was part of a plan so much bigger than the one I was clutching that I could not see the edges of it. Job lost everything in an afternoon, and still had the nerve to say, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.” Not because the loss stopped hurting. Because he knew whose hand was on the rope.
We know the plan exists. That is the strange part. Most of us believe, on paper, that God is working something out. But knowing the plan is there is not the test. The test is the grip. The test is whether, in the split second the rope moves, you reach for God or you reach for control.
Today I lean on trust more than I ever have in my life. And I only got here because of the confession. Because I first tightened, and choked, and ran out of air, and then finally opened my hands. The grip is what taught me to trust the plan. God let me feel the rope burn so I would finally stop pulling.
The Midnight Move
Name the one rope you are gripping right now. One relationship, one person, one outcome you have your fist wrapped around because you stopped trusting that God had it.
Tonight, before you sleep, do one physical thing. Open your hand. Literally. Sit somewhere quiet, hold your hand out in front of you, close it into a fist the way you have been closing it around that person, and then slowly open it and say out loud: “This one is Yours. I take my hands off the rope.”
You will feel how badly your hand wants to close again. Let it stay open anyway. That open hand is what faith actually looks like. Not a feeling. A choice, made with your fingers.
What’s forged at midnight cannot be broken by the dawn.
— Gabriel Vangelatos, The Midnight Visionary