Just Sit There!

Several years ago, I first heard the now famous story of Larry Walters, a very simple, very bored 33-year-old truck driver who decided he wanted to see his neighborhood from a totally new perspective. So he went down to the local army surplus store one morning and bought forty-five used weather balloons. That afternoon he strapped himself into a lawn chair, to which several of his friends tied the now helium-filled balloons. Grabbing a six-pack of beer, a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, a CB radio and a BB gun, he took off – figuring he could shoot the balloons one at a time when he was ready to land.

Can’t you just imagine the scene?

Walters, who assumed the balloons would lift him about 100 feet in the air, was caught off guard when the chair soared more than 15,000 feet into the sky—smack into the middle of the air traffic pattern at Los Angeles International Airport. Entirely too high and wildly now too frightened to shoot any of the balloons, he stayed airborne for more than two hours, forcing the airport to shut down its runways for much of the afternoon, causing long delays in flights from across the country.

Soon after he was safely grounded and ticketed by the Long Beach police, reporters asked him three obvious questions:

"Were you scared?" "Yes." 

“Would you do it again?" "No." 

"Why did you do it?" 

"Because," he said, "you can't just sit there." 

I love that! I love this story for all sorts of reasons. 

I love it simply for its comedy value.   I smile as I picture some bored guy and his goofy buddies getting this utterly silly idea and daring Larry into it (although history tells us it was actually all Larry's idea). Though avoiding airliners while floating along in lawn chair and weather balloons is the ultimate “don’t try this at home” moment, Lawnchair Larry, as he came to be known in the 80’s, had an absolutely amazing adventure.  He got to experience something few people ever will (or ever should!).  He may well not have been the very brightest bulb on the tree, he may not have been the kind of guy with a lot of answers to life's biggest questions, but his “you can’t just sit there” reason for taking action still makes me think... 

You can’t just sit there. I think those are very motivational words for some of us. Some of us have found a place of comfort in life and, either intentionally or unintentionally, we’ve made the decision to just sit there. Just sit in our church pews. Just sit in a relationship going bad. Just sit in a job situation we find truly meaningless. Just sit in front of our televisions, computers and devices. Just sit and blithely watch children struggle while we do nothing. Just sit in a world coming apart at the seams and quickly going to hell. Just sit in a life we’ve found sad but safe – trivial but tolerable. How truly awful! Is that what our Christian hope is supposed to offer? A good sit? If you’re in this “just sit there” position, perhaps it’s time to start strapping some spiritual weather balloons to your lawn chair and see where God might take you. Perhaps it’s time for a wild and wonderful adventure. Perhaps it’s time to reconsider what your hope in life truly is; why God created you and what He has uniquely qualified you to do. Don’t just sit there; get hopeful and get exploring! 

You can’t just sit there.  On the other hand, these oddly simple "just can’t sit there" words also bring to mind thoughts completely contrary to everything I’ve just said. 

For some people, I believe “you can’t just sit there” is a phrase almost tyrannically bad; perhaps even demonically evil. Some of us are already so ridiculously busy, so absurdly pulled and fractured into so many different directions that “just sitting there” may well be exactly what we need to do most. Some of us are so busily religious, so busy with jobs, families and other good and bad entanglements, we literally have no time to “just sit” and listen to a God longing to spend time with us; a God longing to fill us with the hope we need to adventurously persevere. Perhaps some of us need to understand that what we need most in the world is some extended time to “just to sit there.” If you’re in this second lawn chair side of the story, whatever you do, don’t just do something, sit there! 

You can’t just sit there. Then again, maybe that’s exactly what some of us should do.

May God help us clearly discern which sort of lawn chair decisions we should be making!

Amen.

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Postscript:  Sadly, Larry Walters took his own life in 1993 at the age of only 44 by shooting himself in the heart in the Angeles National Forest.  It wrecks the whole story, doesn’t it?  How terribly sad!  How utterly tragic that someone so hungry for life and adventure couldn't find the hope necessary to continue his adventure to the end...