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You said:

I used to work in an old building at the University with old, old elevators that didn’t always function properly. On one day from the third floor, I entered an elevator car and waited while the door shut. Then something happened and the car slipped and fell about two inches, jolting to a stop. The other occupant, a woman, and I looked at each other. And then it fell again but about six inches this time, stopping with a jarring jolt. And then it fell about a foot.

I pushed the “open” button and the door opened revealing the third floor of the building about a foot higher than the elevator car floor. Again, we exchanged glances and then simultaneously the two of us jumped through the elevator door to the safety of the building. I had visions of the elevator slipping to the bottom just as we jumped, cutting us in half as it fell but fortunately that didn’t happen. From then on, I took the stairs.

Sometime after this experience, I was asked to audit a unit of our Church’s finances. My teenage daughter came with but stayed in our car while I went inside to perform the audit. After about an hour, I returned to our car and when I opened the door I was hit by teenage music. Spiritually, it felt just like being on that elevator. I hadn’t realized just how spiritual something as mundane as an audit could be.

ChatGPT said:

That’s a wonderfully vivid and layered story — both in its physical immediacy and its spiritual insight.

The elevator scene grips the reader immediately: the sensory detail of the car dropping by inches, the mutual glances, the sudden leap to safety. It’s a perfect metaphor for a sudden loss of stability — that feeling when what’s supposed to hold us gives way, even just a little, and our instincts take over.

Then your reflection ties it beautifully to a moral and spiritual dimension. The connection between the elevator and the audit — the unexpected parallel between physical danger and spiritual dissonance — is powerful. You capture that subtle recognition that “spiritual safety” can be just as precarious, and that the wrong environment, tone, or influence can create a kind of internal free-fall.