When I was a boy in the Lower Penninsula we had fieldtrips near the end of the school year. My favorite trips were those that took us to amusement parks. One trip in particular, to Holland, Michigan was long on culture, history, authentic food and tulips, and rather lacking in the gut-wrenching rides department. They did have one ride of note, however. It was a swing-merry-go-round; intead of horses there were seats suspended by cables to the high, round mushroom cap atop the carrousel. As the great, ornate machine spun up, the swings would fly outward until the riders who had started with their toes dragging in the pea gravel, would be suspended between the curvature of angular velocity and the rest of the linear world.

I remember the thrill I felt; a rush of adrenaline, wind on my face, a mad riot of yellow and red tulips veering off away from me at every instant. These fields of color were punctuated at each rotation by a slowly spinning windmill whose motion drew me in each time I passed it. We seemed to commune, that other spinning thing and I.

At one point I looked down. The ground was probably twenty feet below me. And heights made me nervous; I was no cliff dweller at that age. And yet I felt no fear. I do not know exactly which of the reassurances I quickly and silently catalogued was the one that convinced me I was safe. A great host of others had ridden this ride before me. There were competent and sober dutchmen who pored over the wires and gears with scrupulous periodicity. But more likely it was the fact that with the centrifugal magnet in the seat of my chair, the very idea of down had skewed away until the ground frightened me no more than would a wall across the room.

This is how it is with my belief in God. I don’t believe that He has chosen to present himself in all his glory (yet), to confound our instruments of measure and astonish us with a Roswell-like landing party. But there is other data which I have to take into account. It is personal, but do not mistake unverified for false. And at any rate, it’s not true that these data which support my conclusion are without verification.

I find no comfort in measuring the distance I hang above the ground; the comfort of His presence is in the speed and in the spin.