We don’t like the word ‘fall’.  It scares us. We fall off a cliff.  We fall for a get-rich-quick scheme.  We trip and fall and hurt ourselves.  “Did she fall for it?”  is a line laughed about at many bars. The season Fall is a time of slowing down and things dying and it getting colder and almost a depressed feeling of summer is over…happy, sunny times are gone, and now it’s fall.  We go back to school in the fall. We have a fall from grace.  It’s almost as if the word alone makes us shudder.

Yet, we fall in love.  “I’m falling for you” can be some of the most heartfelt words spoken.  I’ve often thought about the feeling that we get in the pit of our stomach when we fall.  We all know that feeling, when we are standing up really, really high and peer over the edge and we get that strange, nervous, don’t know how to describe it, feeling that we are going to fall so we start to sweat and shake and we back up or do anything to get us back to safety.  Or we are on an airplane and it’s kind of bumpy and we get that odd feeling of falling. And for a few moments we are kind of afraid.  And then there’s falling in love.  We get butterflies. And we get that strange, nervous, don’t know how to describe it, feeling in our stomach that we are going to fall so we start to sweat and shake and we back up or do anything to get us back to safety….  Did you ever stop to realize that it’s the same feeling? The butterflies of falling in love and that weird feeling when we are afraid of falling off a cliff is the same feeling.  And isn’t that odd and enduring at the same time?  I mean, isn’t it funny that ‘falling’ can make us afraid whether it’s a matter of love or death? Did we ever stop to realize that the word ‘fall’ might scare us because we are afraid of something that can hurt us?

As we move forward into 2017, I challenge you to not be afraid of falling.  Whether it’s off a cliff or in love.  And my hope for you that if you do fall, you feel more butterflies than turbulence.  Because falling doesn’t have to be so bad, after all.

With love from Grand Haven,

Julie