Trusting God When You Can’t See the Way Down
The descent
Nearly everything written about Everest is about getting up. Brian Dickinson’s story is about getting down.
On May 15, 2011, Brian stood alone on the summit at 29,035 feet — his climbing partner had turned back, ill, about 1,000 feet below. Shortly after reaching the top, snow blindness took his vision. He was alone, low on oxygen, and unable to see the route he had just climbed. The descent to high camp took seven hours.
He could not see the fixed lines. He could not see the drop-offs. What he had was his training, his feel for the mountain, and his faith. So he did the only thing available to him: he trusted what he knew was true, and took the next step. Then the next one. For seven hours.
That is what trusting God usually looks like in real life. Not a feeling. Not a guarantee about how it ends. A decision, repeated step by step, to act on what you know is true about God when you cannot see what He is doing.
What letting go is — and what it isn’t
Letting go is one of the most used and least explained phrases in Christian life. From the counselor’s side of our work — JoAnna is a Christian counselor (MSW) who works with people healing after trauma — letting go is not:
- Pretending it doesn’t hurt
- Skipping grief because “God has a plan”
- Passivity — letting go of the outcome is not letting go of the effort
Letting go is releasing your grip on the parts that were never yours: the outcome, the timing, other people’s choices. On Everest, Brian could not control the blindness, the weather, or the oxygen. He could control his next step, his pace, and his panic. Releasing the first list is what freed him to work the second. “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5, NIV) is not advice to stop thinking. It is a description of where the weight goes when your own understanding runs out — which, at 29,000 feet and blind, it does quickly.
Trust is trained, not summoned
Nobody descends Everest blind on willpower. Brian descended on training — hundreds of hours of rescue-swimmer and mountaineering discipline that his body could run when his eyes couldn’t. His first principle from that world: trust your training.
Faith works the same way. The time to build trust in God is before the crisis, in the ordinary disciplines nobody applauds: prayer when nothing is wrong, Scripture before you need it, a community that knows you. “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10, NIV) is spoken in the Psalms to people in turmoil — stillness is not the absence of the storm; it is a settled knowledge in the middle of it. You cannot manufacture that knowledge at the worst moment of your life. You can only draw on what you have stored.
The part after the descent
Here is what survival stories usually leave out: Brian got down. Then he had to heal. Survival is an event; healing is a process, and confusing the two leaves a lot of people stuck — wondering why they’re “still not over it” weeks or years after their own descent ended.
This is where JoAnna’s work begins, and it is why we wrote Calm in the Chaos together. Healing after trauma involves telling the truth about what happened, grieving what it cost, and letting God work in the places effort can’t reach. “In all things God works for the good of those who love him” (Romans 8:28, NIV) is not a promise that all things are good. It is a promise about what God does with them — given time, honesty, and surrender.
If you are in the descent right now: control what you can. Take the next step. Don’t let panic make the decision. And when the plan changes — and it will — adapt and keep moving. That is not motivational talk. It is how a blind man got off a mountain, and it is how people get through the seasons that follow their own worst days.
Hear this taught live
Brian and JoAnna Dickinson teach on trusting God, letting go, resilience, and healing after trauma to churches, Christian universities, and faith conferences through their joint program, Faith, Resilience & Healing. If your community is walking through a hard season, we’d be honored to bring this conversation to them.