Felix Baumgartner stands up out of his seat.
He steps forward on to the capsule's platform. His toes, encased in the boots of his pressure suit, creep over the edge. Above him a monstrous high altitude balloon, 30 million cubic feet in volume, stretches out into the dark sky. 120,000 feet beneath him, he can see the curvature of the earth. Felix prepares to leap into space. He steps off the edge and soon, accelerating in freefall through the super thin atmosphere, Felix will break the speed of sound. After 5 minutes and 35 seconds hurtling through the sky at speeds greater than 690mph, a drogue chute opens to slow him down before the main parachute deploys and deposits him back on the planet, he hopes.
In just a few weeks, if all goes to plan, Felix and his Red Bull Stratos team will attempt to break the world record for the highest parachute jump and the longest and fastest freefall. These titles have been held for the last 50 years by the American, Joe Kittinger. His records have seen numerous challengers in that time. All have failed; some died trying.
I’ve always been fascinated by extreme sports and I’ve spent the last year following the build up of the Stratos project. The team boast many laudible aims which include furthering our understanding of human physiology and the effects of supersonic travel on the body in freefall, advancing pressure suit technology to help astronauts escape in the event of a malfunction during launch and providing data to help future researchers and scientists. I believe that these are genuine objectives but I’m pretty sure they’re not the primary motivation for Felix and the majority of the fans watching the story unfold. There’s something in the human spirit that simply loves to push the boundaries, to master new skills and to overcome obstacles. It was summed up in 1894 when the founder of the reinvigorated Olympian movement Pierre de Coubertin coined its motto: “Citius, Altius, Fortius” or “Swifter, Higher, Stronger”.
Not very Christian... is it? Surely gentle Jesus ‘meek and mild’ wouldn’t have strapped himself into a composite capsule and launched himself into the stratosphere only to leap out and plunge back to the earth? That’s probably true but I think we can reveal an element of God’s character when we seek out new challenges and push the limits of human capabilities. In the book of Genesis, in the very first chapter, God empowers creation to reproduce, to grow, to multiply and expand. Humanity arrives on the scene and we’re commissioned to use and order creation; to maximise its potential. There’s something hardwired into humanity that searches for opportunities to fulfil this commission.
What potential and opportunities has God endowed you with? Maybe you’re studying sports science and you have the opportunity to explore how to maximise and discover the outer limits of the human body’s performance. Maybe you’re reading fine art and you can search and produce the beautiful examples of our creative potential. Perhaps you’re doing a degree in construction management and you can work to build a better functioning and more sustainable world.
I hope our identity, significance and self-worth and increasingly found in Jesus, what he says about us and not in our ‘performance’. However, I’m convinced that we have an incredible and exciting opportunity to participate in God’s commission for this planet and some of that can be discovered in going swifter, higher and stronger. Let’s commit to learning as much as we can during our time at university, find new ways of doing things, overcome hurdles that our predecessors felt were impossible and propel the next generation on the shoulders of our achievements. We have the power to choose what to do with creation so let’s use it well and have some fun doing it!
