Perception.

Have you ever made a rope of hemp before? I have!

I'm reading yet another C.S. Lewis book for class right now, and came across this short passage that got me a-thinking.

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth of falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it?”

On the church history I was on, they showed us how they used to make these hemp ropes. What you had to do was take the hemp and roll it around a machine that would wind them together. You had to do it at just the right speed or it wouldn't be tight enough, or it would be too tight.

 If you wind it up well though, that little rope can pull several hundred pounds! Those little things hold fast together! Sometimes I wonder if I really have a solid testimony of my Church and its teachings.


That rope represents the straight and narrow, and the frays are like paths that we can go off on, but we can burn those frays off, as people who use the ropes often do! I swear I'm not explaining this that well...

Aside from that though, your friends are like that rope. You have few true friends, but they are the ones that you trust like heck. You never know how much you really believe anyone until their truth of falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it?

I'm terribly afraid of heights, but I do have that handful of friends that I would trust to hang me over that precipice, especially when I need to, so that I can learn and grow and become.  Do you have those friends?