What Goes Up, Must Come Down.

What Goes Up, Must Come Down.

LADDERS! 

From first placing our teensy baby foot on that bottom rung, we climb skyward.  Preschool. Who colors best?  Primary school. We are evaluated and separated for some are already scampering up the ladder quicker.   Athletics.  Racing down a football field, slamming a basketball through a net or hitting a baseball over a fence farther, faster – striving to be a step ahead of the next batter.  What’s the score? Heaven forbid we might sit on the fence.  No, someone is gaining. Look up and keep climbing through schooling and then….

                Marriage for most – and children. Whom we push and prod over the fence, up their ladders.   Dance lessons, tennis lessons, etiquette lessons.  Yes, our upwardly mobile offspring must have the good manners to say, “Pardon me” as they step over friend or foe on their assent.  Up, Up , Up.  Nice cars with nice pretty paint jobs.  Nice clothes.  We all look so pretty on our ladders.

                True confession.  Being a stay-at-home mom, I thought I could pass on this ladder-of-success trap.  Felt rather smug.  Then I realized my ladder might not skyrocket at a corporate-America, t-square 90 degree angle – but it’s there.    The state of my house, children, marriage, body mass, skin-sag percentage, checkbook. My own weird labyrinth that I’m desperately scaling.    Foolishly, under the self-delusion that I wasn’t even on a ladder, it is surprising that I hadn’t already fallen.

 But regardless of how far we ascend in life, time inevitably heaves us off our perch.  Even the sturdiest of ladders is temporary.  Recently, I read a sentence by John Ortberg musing about this ladder business that stopped me mid-rung.  “The problem with spending your life climbing up the ladder is that you will go right past Jesus, for he’s coming down.” All our lives….Up, Up, Up.  And what did Jesus do – He came down. 

                A great irony of eternal significance is that it is not always found by vainly looking up – no, it often right before you.   Ladders, while quite helpful in painting a house are major stumbling blocks to lasting peace and happiness.  Maybe life’s answer is not in some internal, infernal combustible struggle reaching upward — but in reaching outward to your neighbor.  Madison is filled with beautiful people of all races, creeds and economic means.  Just think what it could be if we all donated our ladders to the fire department?