I was crazy enough to ride one of the world’s fastest and highest roller coasters, the Dragster in Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, not just once, but twice yesterday.
Before the coaster starts, you’re sitting below something that looks like a stoplight for a racecar, waiting for it to flash green. The split second it does, you’re propelled from zero to 120 miles per hour in less than a second. For such a rush, the proper precautions must be taken. You lift up on the lap bar a couple of extra times just to make sure you won’t be falling out and say an extra prayer that the ride won’t happen to malfunction.
But once you safely get over the single 420-foot, 90-degree angle peak, you’re in the clear, and you begin to trust the machinery. Yet those chains that crank the ride up the peak and the cab that you and a couple dozen other people sit in were all made by the hands of mere mortals. Mortals like my friend Amanda. She spends all day behind a computer designing the chains and screws that keep these rides together. She, along with several hundred other people, is entrusted with the lives of the thousands of people who will ride such roller coasters this summer.
I easily put my hands in the life of such a ride, especially if I hear the statistics of how safe it is. But do I really trust my life completely in the hands of the One who created not just the nuts and bolts that hold rides together, but the sky and the ground, the oceans and the trees around me? If such a magnificent, careful Creator asks me to do something dangerous, will He not surely provide perfect safety for me as well?
“The safest place you could ever be is in the center of God’s will.”
I wish I had a quarter for every time I heard a minister use that line. But it’s really begun to sink into me. My friends over in Iraq who are called to fight for the freedom of that nation—men who are surrounded by bombs and guns every day—are actually safer over there than they would be if they were sleeping in a white-picket-fence town in Smallville, USA, yet out of the will of God.
I can breathe a sigh of relief because I know the Creator of the particular ride I’m on, and I can trust that He’s going to take care of me. I don’t need to keep holding onto the lap bar for fear that’s He’s going to let me go. I can lift my hands high, scream for joy instead of fright and trust that His solid grasp on me is steadfast.
