Can the Fifteenth Floor Ever Become the First?
Can Sorrow Become Joy?
Part One
The Fifteenth Floor That Had to Become the First
When I was twenty years old, I had to make the fifteenth floor become the first.
Of course, I wasn’t trying to change the building.
I was trying to change my heart.
At twenty, I worked on the fifteenth floor of an apartment building under construction.
Every time I climbed the ladder to begin my work, the first thing I saw was empty air. When I looked down, the ground seemed impossibly far away.
During those first few days, I wasn’t really learning how to do the job.
I was learning how to wrestle with fear.
A hammer in my right hand.
A small anchor bolt in my left.
I had to hold the bolt against the concrete and strike it accurately.
But fear reached all the way into my fingertips.
My trembling hand missed again and again.
Then the hammer struck my thumb instead of the bolt.
Blood began to run down my hand.
Oddly enough, it didn’t hurt.
When you are consumed by the fear that you might fall to your death, even the pain in your thumb barely registers.
Every gust of wind made my body sway ever so slightly.
But it wasn’t really my body that was shaking.
It was my heart.
I wanted to quit.
I wanted to run away.
I never wanted to climb back up there again.
But at that time, I had no choice except to endure.
Somehow, I had to hold on.
Then one day, a strange thought crossed my mind.
“What if I simply thought of the fifteenth floor as the first?”
Even now, it sounds ridiculous.
The fifteenth floor was still the fifteenth floor.
Thinking otherwise could never turn it into the first.
Still, I repeated the same words to myself every day.
“This is the first floor.”
“This is the first floor.”
“This is the first floor.”
At first, it felt like a lie.
It felt forced.
But I kept saying it.
Holding on to a different thought takes far more strength than most people realize when fear is trying to take over your mind.
One day passed.
Then another.
Then another.
And eventually, I realized something unexpected.
The fifteenth floor was still the fifteenth floor.
The wind had not changed.
The empty space beneath me had not changed.
The danger had not changed.
Only one thing had: The person standing there.
The fear never completely disappeared.
But it could no longer control me.
From that day on, one question remained with me for many years.
The fifteenth floor could never become the first.
So why had I found peace?
Could it be that not every change begins when reality changes?
Could some changes begin when the person looking at reality changes?
That question led me into a world my twenty-year-old self had never known.
Part Two
Can Sorrow Become Joy?
Even after I left the construction site, that question stayed with me.
The fifteenth floor had not changed.
But I had.
So what, exactly, had changed?
As the years passed, I slowly came to realize something.
Human beings do not simply live in reality.
We live by the way we interpret reality.
Two people can experience the same failure.
One concludes that life is over.
The other says it was a new beginning.
The reality is the same.
Yet the worlds they live in are completely different.
The first place that taught me this was neither a classroom nor a book.
It was a fifteenth-floor balcony on a construction site.
There I learned that even when reality cannot be changed, the heart that looks at reality can.
That realization led me to ask even bigger questions.
Can sorrow become joy?¹
Can misfortune become a blessing?
Can despair become hope?
Can death become life?²
At first, those questions sounded absurd.
Sorrow is sorrow.
Misfortune is misfortune.
Death is death.
Isn’t it?
And yet, not everyone who suffers becomes the same person.
Some are crushed by pain.
Others, through that very pain, learn to understand the tears of others.
So what changed?
Was it reality?
Or was it the person?
Little by little, I found myself leaning toward the second answer.
When the person changes, the meaning of reality changes with them.
But another question soon stopped me in my tracks.
If the human heart can change like this… where does that change come from?
Can sheer determination accomplish it?
Or is there Someone deeper than ourselves who quietly holds our hearts when we no longer can?
That question eventually led me back to a verse I had known for years.
“Be strong and courageous.”
Part Three
Be Strong and Courageous
“Be strong and courageous.”
For a long time, I assumed those words were meant for brave people.
I wasn’t one of them.
At twenty, I wasn’t courageous.
I was terrified.
Every time I climbed the ladder, my heart gave way before my feet did.
My hands trembled.
Blood still stained my thumb.
More than once, I wanted to run away.
And yet, the next morning, I climbed back up.
The wound on my thumb had not fully healed, but I wrapped my hand around the hammer once again.
Looking back now, I sometimes wonder if I had already begun living those words without realizing it.
Perhaps being strong and courageous has never meant feeling no fear.
Perhaps it means taking one more step even while fear is still with you.
That was exactly what I was doing.
I didn’t climb because the fear was gone.
I climbed with the fear.
That day.
The next day.
And the day after that.
Every day, I fought to keep hold of my heart.
“This is the first floor.”
“This is the first floor.”
Those words were never meant to deny reality.
They were my way of refusing to let fear become my reality.
Years later, I found myself returning to a familiar passage from the Bible.
Before Joshua led the Israelites into the Promised Land, God repeatedly told him,
“Be strong and courageous.” ³
Something about that always puzzled me.
If God had already promised to be with Joshua… why did He still tell him to be strong and courageous?
Slowly, I began to understand.
God’s promise to be with us does not mean we have no responsibility.
There is still a part only we can do.
We must choose, day after day, to steady our hearts.
At twenty, that was exactly what I tried to do.
I did everything I could to keep fear from taking control.
And those efforts were not in vain.
They shaped me.
They taught me to keep taking one more step.
But as the years passed, I discovered something else.
A person can strengthen their own heart.
But eventually, even the strongest heart reaches its limit.
And it was precisely there—at the end of my own strength—that I encountered the words of Jesus in an entirely new way.
Part Four
Is Peace Something We Create… or Something We Receive?
“Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you.” ⁴
Jesus never simply told us to create peace for ourselves.
He said, “My peace I give to you.”
The moment those words truly reached my heart, it felt as though a knot I had been carrying for years quietly came undone.
When I was twenty, I fought to turn the fifteenth floor into the first.
Looking back, I don’t believe those efforts were wasted.
They strengthened my heart.
They taught me how to keep walking even when fear wanted me to stop.
But eventually I discovered something I had never understood before.
The way beyond my limits was not found in creating more peace for myself.
It was found in receiving the peace that Christ freely gives.
Only then could I finally answer the question that had followed me since I was twenty.
The fifteenth floor never became the first.
Sorrow never becomes something that never happened.
Misfortune is not erased.
And yet, in God’s hands,
Sorrow can become the seed of joy.
Despair can become the road that leads to hope.
Fear can become the place where courage is born.
Real change never begins by denying reality.
It begins by acknowledging reality, bringing it before God, holding on with the strength He gives, and finally receiving the peace He offers.
Epilogue
Sometimes I find myself looking up at tall buildings.
And whenever I do, I remember the twenty-year-old standing on that fifteenth-floor balcony.
The trembling hands.
The blood running down my thumb.
The fear I never dared tell anyone about.
Every single day, that young man whispered the same words to himself: “This is the first floor.”
At the time, it was the best he knew how to do.
He fought with everything he had simply to keep his heart from falling apart.
Even now, I treasure those days.
They taught me that courage is often nothing more than taking one more step when every part of you wants to run away.
If I could meet that young man again today, this is what I would tell him:
“You’re doing better than you think.”
“Keep going.”
“Take one more step, even if you’re afraid.”
“And don’t stop guarding your heart.”
“But one day…”
“You’ll discover a peace deeper than the one you’ve been trying so hard to create.”
“You’ll discover that you were never meant to carry your heart by yourself forever.”
Now I finally understand.
Real change was never about turning the fifteenth floor into the first.
It was about learning to stand on the fifteenth floor with the peace of someone standing on the first.
So now I can finally answer the question this essay began with.
The fifteenth floor never became the first.
But the young man standing on it did not remain the same.
Notes
- John 16:20 (ESV) — “Your sorrow will turn into joy.”
- John 11:25 (ESV) — Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me, though he die, yet shall he live.”
- Joshua 1:9 (ESV) — “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.”
- John 14:27 (ESV) — “Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.”
