Two Hundred Feet Up and Frozen

In the climbing community, they call it "sewing machine leg" — that uncontrollable trembling that seizes your calf when fear takes over on the rock face. Climbing instructor Maria Castillo has seen it hundreds of times at Red River Gorge in Kentucky. A climber gets halfway up, looks down, and freezes. Every muscle locks. The rope is secure, the anchors are set, but none of that matters when panic has its grip.

Maria always gives the same instruction: "Look up. Find the next hold. Just look."

Not "climb faster." Not "try harder." Not "figure it out." Just look. Because in climbing, your body follows your eyes. The moment a terrified climber lifts their gaze from the drop below to the hold above, something shifts. The trembling quiets. The next move becomes possible.

In the wilderness of Numbers 21, the Israelites were frozen in a different kind of terror — serpents coiling at their feet, venom burning through their veins. They had grumbled against God and against Moses, and now death was everywhere they looked. But the Almighty did not ask them to earn their healing. He did not demand a sacrifice or a pilgrimage. He told Moses to lift a bronze serpent on a pole and gave the simplest instruction imaginable: look.

Not "do more." Not "be better." Just look — and live.

Sometimes the hardest act of faith is also the simplest: lifting our eyes from the thing that's killing us to the provision God has already raised up.