“When The Way Out May Not Be The Way Out”

His leg was shattered. He was exhausted, frightened, and on the brink of despair.

 And then he fell.

Joe Simpson had already summited Siula Grande when everything went wrong.

During the descent, he slipped and shattered his leg, a catastrophic injury at that altitude. His climbing partner, Simon Yates, did the only thing possible: he began lowering Simpson down the mountain, one painful section at a time.

As the terrain steepened and a storm closed in, Simpson was left hanging below an overhang, out of sight. Unable to hold the weight any longer and believing Simpson was already dead, Yates made an impossible decision. He cut the rope.

Simpson fell…… tumbling and sliding down the mountain until the ground disappeared beneath him and he dropped into a crevasse below the glacier.

When he regained consciousness, he wasn’t rescued. He wasn’t out.

He was alive but badly injured, alone, and trapped inside the mountain. The walls were sheer ice. His leg was useless. The way he had come was impossible to climb. And staying where he was meant only one thing: he would eventually die there.

It was there that he made the most counterintuitive decision of his life. With no way up and no promise of rescue, he chose to move in the only direction left.

He went down.

Simpson’s story is an incredible one and I recommend that you check it out. In fact, his story has stuck with me for almost twenty years because something about it grabbed hold of me and just won’t let go. The analogy that has gnawed at me all these years is this:

Sometimes, instead of trying to escape our hardship, we must go deeper into it to find healing.

I know, I know…….this flies in the face of our basic instincts. When life gets unbearable….painful……difficult……we do all we can to escape it or find immediate relief. We bury our emotions. We escape into our “drugs of choice” like pornography, alcohol, overeating, shopping……anything to numb out or to feel good just for a moment.

And yet, we must ask ourselves……does this really work?

Oh….maybe for a metaphorical minute or two…..but does it REALLY help us? I dare say no. These strategies are more like Joe Simpson trying to climb 150 feet out of a hole with a broken leg. It seems like the right idea, but it’s not really viable.

I propose that it’s time we went deeper……that it’s a better strategy to embrace the hardship so we can be transformed in the middle of it.

We have seen a trend towards this over the past several years in the movement towards therapies that emphasize somatic strategies. Approaches that lead clients to identify where in their bodies they feel their negative emotions like anger, anxiety, or depression…..and then guiding clients to lean into those emotions to see that they can fully experience them and still be okay. In fact, many psychotherapists now believe that this is a truer path to healing than insight or behavioral therapy.

My Christian worldview agrees.

I have come to believe that our constant attempts to escape or bury our difficult emotions are actually barriers to allowing God to heal those places in our hearts. That our efforts to numb out or run away hinder us from being transformed into stronger, healthier people.

Henri Nouwen wrote in his book, “The Inner Voice of Love” that, “the pain you suffer now (he is referring to loneliness primarily) is meant to put you in touch with the place you most need healing, your very heart.”

I couldn’t agree more.

I know this doesn’t sound like the advice you want to hear. I get it. I really do. But I have come to believe that when we endure hardship and suffering, God reveals the parts  of our heart that need the most healing. In fact, I would submit that when those painful emotions rise to the surface, it is because God knows it is PRECISELY the time when He wants to work in those secret places.

And yet we run……and hide…..and escape……and avoid.

And so, we delay our own healing. We sabotage what we want the most; to grow in strength, courage, and resilience.

Like Simpson in the crevasse, we have a choice. We can either continue the fruitless attempts to escape, or we can choose to give up and wallow in our misery,  eventually allowing the best parts of us to “die” within us……or……we can go deeper. We can embrace these hard emotions and trust that we can feel them and still be okay. In fact, this is the path that is most likely to lead us to a true path forward.

Simpson found that survival was not about escape but was found by embracing the unknown.

Somatic therapists say that healing happens when we can feel emotion in the body without fleeing it.

Nouwen says that transformation happens when we stop running from pain and stay with it.

All three are circling the same truth; that if we will stop running from our pain and embrace it…….even more, if we will invite God into it……real change and true healing can happen.

It won’t be easy. It never is. In fact, if it were, we wouldn’t be trying so hard to escape; we wouldn’t be desperately searching for relief.

But what is it that we really want?

Don’t we want to grow beyond our fears? Don’t we want to become people who are resilient and courageous, despite life’s challenges? As people of faith, don’t we want to be all that God wants us to be?

If so, then we must stop our futile attempts to escape; stop trying to climb out of the crevasse. Instead, we must take the harder course and go deeper. Because that’s where we find true escape.

Perhaps the question is not whether we will face pain…that much is unavoidable…but whether we will spend our lives trying to climb out of it, or whether we will learn to stay present long enough for God to meet us there. The way out we most long for may not come through escape or relief, but through courage, patience, and trust…the willingness to go deeper when every instinct tells us to flee. And it may be there, in the very place we least want to remain, that healing quietly begins.