I leapt over the chasm, grasping for an outcropping of stone I thought was just within my reach.  I missed.  I landed lightly on a narrow shelf of rock a few feet below my original target.  I scrambled up to the top of the outcropping, turned, and looked down.  I shivered as I watched stray pebbles drop hundreds of feet to carom off the side of the mountain.  As my fear faded, I laughed, for I was a twelve-year-old boy who had dodged death at the top of Pike’s Peak.

I have always been a daredevil.  I loved tempting death, pushing myself faster, farther, and harder than before, wondering if maybe this time I would lose control and meet my God.  I took some incredible chances and always won.  I discovered that the secret to succeeding at these mad games was to not care whether I lived or died.  I laughed at my folly and fear.  Of course, I also liked the rush I got from beating death.

I think every teenage boy feels invincible until some event in his life convinces him otherwise.  Usually this event causes him to face his own mortality, and he understands, for the first time, that death could result from his actions.  This significant moment in a young man’s life marks the onset of wisdom and maturity.  There may not be an “event” but simply a gradual, imperceptible change.  Or this radical transformation can occur in an instant so terrible that every extraneous stimulus is stripped away leaving a lone, naked soul to stare into eternity.  For me, this realization was traumatic, to say the least.

Please understand that I was not so completely self-absorbed that I never considered how devastated my family would be if I died.  It is just that we are Christians, and we knew where we were going when we died.  I thought the worst minute in heaven is better than the best minute on earth, so I did not mind dying since it meant moving on to a better place.  I still believe this just as strongly as I did when I was a boy.  I am, however, a little wiser now.

With this in mind, it probably comes as no surprise that I like rock climbing.  Ever since my parents took me on a trip to the Badlands in South Dakota when I was four, I have pursued the sport avidly, or as avidly as one can in Omaha, Nebraska.  Combining a love of dangerous sports with an almost complete disregard for my own safety, I was constantly falling into new adventures.  I explored old, abandoned houses, mapped out newly discovered caves, practiced doing stunts in my car, and, of course, climbed anything taller than I was.

Going away to college did little to dull my carefree attitude.  Then, in May of my twenty-first year, my chorale group went on a singing tour of Russia and Scandinavia.  We spent one week travelling around Norway, and for two of those days we stayed near the coastal town of Kopervik in a little inn at the foot of a small mountain.  As soon as I found my room and dropped my bags on a bed I ran out to find my friend, Dave, with whom I did crazy things.  We had been one-upping each other the whole trip: he swam in the Baltic Sea, so I scaled a castle wall; he stood on the railing around the top of a cruise ship, so I walked on it; and so it went.  I knew he would be just as excited as I was about the prospect of spending forty-eight hours next to a mountain.  We saw each other in the parking lot out by our tour bus and simply turned and started running toward the slope.

The mountain was tall and green with fir trees growing almost to the top, where its bald peak jutted straight up into the clouds for more than a hundred feet.  Dave and I climbed easily through the trees and reached the rocky promontory in well under an hour.  Then it was a fifteen-minute climb up the sloping jumble of rocks to the mountain’s peak.  The view was glorious in the late-afternoon sun.  The air smelled fresh and cool, and the scent of pine trees rose to us on a faint breeze.  The mountains held back a glacier on the northeast and stretched away to the fjords in the southwest.  In the valley, between that icy behemoth and a jagged, deep blue inlet, was nestled cozy Norwegian fishing village.  Dave and I looked down from on high and gazed upon our ant-like friends milling around the hotel.  Then we peered down the face of the cliff and decided to take a step or two back from the edge.  The cliff dropped over one hundred feet down to the body of the mountain; its face was sheer but its back, where Dave and I had climbed to the top, sloped away to melt into the mountain.  The sun would be setting soon and our stomachs offered their opinion on the time, so we decided to head home.  We quickly determined that one side of the cliff, a cross between that perpendicular front and tumbling back, offered a fun, challenging, and survivable descent.

Dave started down, and I said I was going to poke around for another possible route.  We had agreed that the front descent was out of the question.  However, I noticed a small crevice that we had previously overlooked: a ninety-degree wedge, about three feet wide, cut into the face of the cliff.  My heart started pounding because it knew what I was going to do before I did.  I thought I could see some handholds, and a few trees growing out from the crevice looked like they could be useful.  That clinched it for me, and I started down the face of the cliff.

I handily dispensed with the first ten feet and stood, pressed into the wedge, my feet resting on the first tree in the crevice.  So far, so good; I was already thinking about what I would tell Dave and my other friends.  I checked my route, saw another tree below me, and lowered myself seven or eight feet to the next trunk.  Either this was easier than it first appeared, or I was really as good as I thought I was.  I saw a sturdy foothold, a ledge about two inches wide, eight feet below the tree I was standing on, so once again, I lowered myself down to it.  I rested a bit, while looking and feeling around for the next handhold.  But there were none.  I could not climb up at this point because of the angle of the handholds I had used, and I could not reach the next tree two feet below me because there was nothing to hold onto.  Not a single crack or break or knob existed on that sheer cliff face that I could use to descend two feet to the sapling below.  I was stuck.

My toes poised on two inches of rock and my arms stretched out above me with my hands were clamped on a rough tree trunk were all that kept me from plunging ninety feet to my death.  For the first time in my life, I thought I was actually going to die.  Certainly I had taken similar chances before, but at those times I was still in control of the situation--there was always a way for me to win.  This seemed different and well beyond my abilities.  I was stuck on the cliff, and my arms were getting tired.  I yelled for Dave, but there was no answer.  And anyway, there was nothing he could have done in the short time before my strength gave out.

It was maddening, knowing that if I could only move down two more feet, I could reach the next tree.  I pondered simply letting go and trying to catch the trunk as I hurtled past.  But the tree was young and slender, and I thought I would just rip it out of the cliff, assuming I could catch onto it in the first place.  I kept shifting my weight from foot to foot, alternating my arms on the tree above me, trying to conserve my strength.  And I thought about how to get down that mountain.  But after twenty minutes of searching over and over for any sort of handhold, my thoughts drifted to my family and friends.  I thought how horrible it would be for them if I fell.  I thought about how utterly foolish I had been to attempt this and many of the other things I had done.  I thought about how stupid and meaningless this death would be, and I finally understood what my life meant to those I loved.  I began to desperately want to live, and I was terrified because I truly believed I was going to die.  I thought about all of these things, but most of all I prayed.

I prayed harder than I ever had before.  I prayed to God, asking him to deliver me, to save me from my folly, if not for me then for my family.  I was so fearful that He was going to let me fall to pay for my proud idiocy.  I had almost given in to despair, when He gave me an idea.  I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, with my jacket tied around my waist.  With one hand, I reached down, pulled my jacket loose, and threaded it up over the tree trunk from which I was hanging.  I pulled it through until the cuffs were even, dangling in front of my face.  Then, using my jacket as a rope, I started to lower myself, hand over hand, to the sapling below.

When my hands reached the very end of my jacket, I could just scrape the trunk with my toe.  I eased my weight onto it, and the tree held!  I reached up and worked my jacket free.  After a few minutes of gratitude and rest, I continued my descent.  The next tree was actually more difficult to reach--not only did I have to use my jacket as a rope again, but the tree was a couple of feet to my right, so I had to swing a little.  After that, the rest of the climb was relatively easy, and as my foot touched the earth, I dropped to my knees in grateful thanks to my Lord.

The next day, Dave and I guided some friends to the top of that mountain.  We all looked over the edge of the cliff as I recounted my adventure for them.  And as I stood there, marveling at the wonder of God’s creation, I realized a few things.  Rarely have I been so conscious of His presence as I was on that mountaintop, and at the same time, rarely have I been so aware of my own shortcomings.  I became humbler and wiser.  I lost my sense of invincibility and became more selfless.  I was transformed forever in that instant when I was clinging to the precipice between this life and the next.

Mountains still dare me to climb, and I still readily accept that challenge.  In August of 1997, I was negotiating a difficult passage halfway up a fifty-foot cliff.  Todd, my current climbing buddy, had already passed it and was nearing the top.  I thought I could clear the outcropping by jumping straight up and catching the ledge a few feet above my head--a very dangerous maneuver, but not impossible.  As I contemplated this approach, I could not help remembering what I had learned on a cliff in Norway.  I got a stable foothold in the limestone, reached around to my back pocket, and took my wallet out.  I looked at an old snapshot of my family for several minutes, and then, I decided to let the mountain win.