A lesson from a balloon

Holding a yellow balloon, I stood on the platform of a suburban train station in Surrey, in the United Kingdom, and thought about how far I had progressed in such a short time. Three weeks previously, I had come to the edge of a void, both financially and professionally. I was self-employed, but my business, supplemented for several years with temporary and evening shift work, seemed to have come to nothing.

I had avoided signs warning me that I needed to make a decision about the business. Now I was without alternatives or the resources to put whatever decision I might have made into practice. I felt a strong urge to stew in self-blame, to accept that I had neither the attitude nor the skills necessary to run a business. And finding employment at my age looked like a long, difficult struggle.

I have a friend who describes those moments—or months—of uncertainty as being like the cartoon figure who runs off the edge of a cliff and then hangs there, legs a blur of running-above-nothing, before dropping out of sight with a loud yell.

If you are willing to trust God, my friend says, there isn’t the long drop into nothing. Faced with my own experience of running out over a void, I knew I needed to learn that lesson.

As a child, I trusted my parents to provide everything I needed. Whatever challenges they faced in raising me, I had no doubts that I would be cared for. But I struggled with adulthood—with accepting that I could rely on God’s guidance for a constant, unconditional income of Love.It was clear that the only thing to do was to trust God—the "pillar of fire" that led the Israelites to freedom under Moses’ leadership. Instead of condemning myself, I had to expect the answer to come from divine Love, which doesn’t include unjust conditions or penalty clauses.

And yet I knew that Love would lead me to the kind of employment I needed. It was like a prize with my name on it, sitting in full view but out of reach.

The biggest barrier to complete trust in God was my anxious desire—born of fear—to be in control. Although I endlessly told myself “God is in control,” it seemed impossible to accept this. There was a constant urge to try and grab the controls back from God, promising I’d release them when the danger was past.

I’d come a long way from the deep conviction that everything was fine as long as it was within my control, but I was still questioning whether I could live with the answers God gave me.

At this point, however, I realized I had to let go of the controls and recognize that God was the only power at work. And as soon as I “let go,” I felt led to answer an advertisement for a year’s employment as a production manager—an area of work I thought I’d left behind 20 years ago.

Covering for someone who was going on maternity leave, the position was responsible, the salary good and it meant stable employment that would leave my options open at the end of the year.

So there I was on the station platform, going home after work. The yellow balloon was from the maternity-leave party for the woman I was replacing.

That lesson in trust was challenged a week after I took up the position. The employer had second thoughts about paying out a year’s salary in addition to maternity leave, and decided the existing staff could manage. I was out, with the cover-all phrase, “I’m sorry, you’re not suitable.”A sudden gust of wind jerked the balloon away. It bobbed in front of me, almost as if leading the way, and then veered off. I thought about how letting the balloon go was like letting the belief in my own control go, leaving God in control.

I returned to the trust in what the balloon represented—letting go of my own plan and really letting God be in control. As I did this, I realized the trust in God I had held to before had subtly shifted and been replaced with trust in my new job. And from there, I saw that however well-founded my prayer, I had relied on that job because I thought it was the only one I would get at my age.

Mary Baker Eddy, the author of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, compares Life, or God, to a circle, and the illusion of life, as a material experience, to a straight line, pointing out that one has no point of contact with the other (282:3-18 ).

I saw I was accepting a view of a life as a straight line with a beginning and an eventual end, with points marking progress along the way. Having reached a point, humanly, midway along the line, I thought certain opportunities in my life and employment were permanently lost, and I had accepted the restrictions that belief imposed.

As I prayed to free myself from that finite view of my life, other job opportunities came up. When that work seemed quiet, I looked to what I had in the house—the apparently empty vessels of my business—and work began to come in there. Now, like Sarah in the Bible who laughed when she realized she was going to give birth, even though she was humanly past childbearing, I saw the seeming void was created out of my own sense of restrictions.

Now, when the way ahead seems empty, I remember the lesson of the balloon and trust that—even if I am apparently running over nothing—God will support me until I find my feet.

A gust of wind
caught my balloon.
A bit of farewell fun
to Josie from the girls.

Along the station platform,
It bobbed gently
as I followed—an
unlikely pillar of flame.

No more unlikely
than getting a job
at my age.
With my background.

That’s all it took—
A bobbing, floating hope
demanding my obedience,
that said, ‘Follow me.’

The balloon bobbed
off into the bushes,
in the way of balloons,
its business with me done.

It had told me my name.
It had shown me where to go.
So I let it go
and went on with the journey—
with God.

Truth has no home in error:

King James Bible
Gen. 21:6,7
Ex. 13:21,22
II Kings 4:2-7