FRESH THYME
Tethered
by Marcy Lytle
There’s a tether ball in my son’s backyard. I don’t see these often anymore, but there it is, that ball that’s on a rope that’s tied to a pole. You can hit it, knock it, the wind can blow it, but it’s tethered to the pole and won’t fly off, go over the fence, or need to be chased.
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I see this tether ball every time I look out the window of my son’s house. It just hangs there, unmoved, unbothered, until someone decides to hit it. Did you know that another name for tether ball is totem tennis? I did not!
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I was recently reading a book and read this passage using the word tether:
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In Mitford, he’d felt tethered; tethered to the Lord’s Chapel, tethered to the rectory, tethered to the little yellow house. Here, he felt as if he were falling into space, tethered only to God.
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You may recognize this passage if you read the Mitford series. It was my first book to read in the series, as I just found it in a little library box, and it was titled A New Song. This pastor had been in this one spot for a long time and had just moved to a new area, full of the unknown, and he pined for the past…where he had been tethered.
I was thinking about the tether ball, and then I read this passage, and the last part of it stuck with me, “tethered only to God.” Have you ever been in a place like that? I remember when we had a series of years where everything that could go wrong went wrong, and I felt as though the foundation of everything I knew and believed had been shaken. I pulled over because now I had a flat tire, and I remember hearing a voice asking me if all I knew was Jesus, that he loved me and died for me, and there was hope after life…was that enough?
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This pastor in the book had become familiar with Mitford, the town where he felt tethered. It was a safe place and he felt at home, and his connection or tie was to the people and things there, and he was just fine with it. But when that tether or connection was severed and he and his wife had to move away, those connections were gone. But he then realized that he was still connected to God.
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I like that picture. I like looking at a tether ball. For all the high winds and the knocking and the throwing, it remains fixed. And here, decades after I heard that question in my ear, I’ve found that when other connections break loose and I’m only connected to God, that connection really is enough.
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He says he will never leave us or forsake us, and to me, that means he’s got us by the hand and won’t let go. He says he will hide us under his wings when storms arise, while the winds pass by. And He says he will carry us to safety when we try to wander off and break that tether.
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If I could tell my younger self anything and my younger self could grasp was I was telling me, it would be that life with Christ isn’t about settling in comfortable places where our surroundings make us happy. While those times are awesome and fun, they come and go and are blown by the wind. And unless we know the character of the One who gave his life for us and settled us in for eternity next to him, we will fret and fluster constantly. And the only way we know Him is by reading about Him and leaning into him every day, over and over again.
That tether ball. It’s an interesting visual, isn’t it?