Jumping into it

The most important thing I have realized while being here and have heard from multiple people (in Ywam and out side of Ywam) that I just need to fully jump in to it and not hold anything back. That is what I decided to do today! After receiving another pep talk from a great friend and women of God that personally I look up to I decided to make a more concise effort to just jump in....... unfortunately today was the day a group of people decided to go cliff diving. I said to my self that I would go and just watch and then maybe next week I would jump. so we got into small groups of three people each and hitch hiked our way to a place called "end of the world" we walked for like a mile or so and then a nice elderly couple on vacation picked us up and gave us a ride all the way to our destination. once there you have to walk this small rocky path that is filled with black lava rocks that shift under your feet. we hiked to the spot where the boys thought you were supposed to jump and looked over it very skeptically. lucky for us a boy named William who had been living here for 6 months directed us to the proper place to jump. It was this small little cove that was very clear I could see the bottom and worried that the boys who were jumping in would hit the bottom (obviously I am from Bellingham and if you see the bottom of the water it is too shallow to jump). the water was stirring with waves that created foam giving all the girls with us the most unsettling feeling in the pit of our stomachs. the boys wasted no time crossing to the other side of the cove and assessing how to go about jumping 35 ft down into the crystal clear water of the cove. Before you knew it William (the 6 month local boy) had jumped! each girl had either let out a quick shriek or drew in a quick breath as he fell into the water. after he had popped out from under the water and swam a ways the other boys who had come with us jumped in. For those of you who know me and know me well know that I love jumping off the boat house back home at Firwood during the summer. So watching this perked my interest. The deciding factor was watching the guys climb back up the cliff. It looked harder then it really was and so finally I decided that it was now or never. Taking off the clothes I had worn for the walk the other girls looked at me like I was crazy while another who had already made her way across to the point where you jump cheered me on. I walked around the bend of the cove and when I got to the spot where you were supposed to jump I walked past the people debating the plunge and pushed off not even thinking. It was a long fall down and before I hit the water I could hear a woot from one of the members of the 12 person group I was in.
Hitting the water was strange. it was a feeling that while I was in the air I thought I would never experience until I finally did. Breaking the surface it finally hit me that I actually jumped! I looked up to the cove above with people sitting and observing to one side and others debating jumping on the other. It was so far up and there I was in the water not knowing how I got there, swimming leisurely in crystal clear (or what I would call crystal clear) water! My moment of bravery did not end there. I still had to climb back up the cliff. this was quite the process. first you had to wait for a wave to come and lift you onto the rock and timing that was a bit difficult. but once on the climb up was all about making sure you had the right footing and good hand holds. once I got back to the top and over to the side where the observers were I realized that no one had gotten a pic! I figured if I was going to go through the trouble of cliff diving i might as well have photographic evidence right? so I asked Kelsey (one of my roommates) to kindly snap a pic of me.
This time instead of just simply jumping into it I really truly JUMPED INTO IT!