Risk at the Ropes Course

I'm late. I try to blog every morning, and when I can't blog in the morning, I try to blog as soon as I can later that day. Today, I've failed on both of those accounts, and I don't have any excuse for it except that I'm pretty tired. This morning, and most of this afternoon, I was with the Young Men of our ward, facilitating a ropes course. It's the kind of thing where you strap yourself into a harness, climb dozens of feet up into the trees, and then attempt to jump between platforms and walk across balance beams. The difficulty in such tasks is not in performing the tasks themselves, but in doing so when you're several stories off the ground.

Personally, I like climbing and balancing and jumping. I do such things for fun, whenever I feel like I can. But I don't usually do them at such great heights. It's strange that things that are easy when things seem relatively safe become extremely difficult when there's a perceived element of risk. In reality, the Young Men were safer today than I usually am when I attempt such things. They were strapped into harnesses, attached to secure ropes. Had any of them missed their jump or lost their balance, the risk of injury was actually pretty small, whereas I'm likely to turn a joint or at least get some bad scrapes one of these days.

I don't know how to pull a gospel message out of this, but it seems odd to me that tasks can be so paralyzingly frightening when they seem difficult, but are actually pretty safe, or fearlessly easy when they seem safer, but may actually be more dangerous. The magnitude of the potential injuries is much less in the latter case, but the likelihood of injury is far greater, yet I have no fear about taking that risk. On our way back from the ropes course, we saw a dry riverbed filled with granite boulders, and I had some desire to climb on them and jump from one to the other, while my desire to do such things at the actual rope course was much less.

Perhaps we could learn that things are rarely as they seem. Some things are safe, but seem dangerous while others are dangerous while appearing safe. The lesson could be in exercising good judgement, and perhaps controlling our fears so that we have fewer reservations about doing things that are actually safe, and perhaps more about doing things that are actually dangerous. Applied in a gospel setting, we could dampen our fears about keeping the commandments and taking whatever risks that involves, and magnify our fears about breaking the commandments, which is certainly more of a risk than any of us should be willing to take.

Our Bishop, who went with us and, as far as I know, made the visit to the ropes course possible, shared dozens of blogworthy, ropes-course-related insights today, beside what I just mentioned. I'll list as many as I can remember tomorrow morning. But for now, I'm due to go bed.