A Year of Sabbaths (Week 49): Blazing Paddles

How precious is Thy steadfast love, O God!

Children take refuge in the in the shadow of Thy wings.

They feast on the abundance of Thy house,  and Thou gives to them drink from the 

River of Thy delights.

For with Thee is the fountain of life; in Thy light do we see light. (Psalm 7-9)

I believe that the command to stop is God's dare for us to trust Him that everything we worry about will get done and the world will be okay even if we drop our responsibilities for a little while. I believe that Sabbath is also a promise that God makes that in stopping, we begin to reconnect with Him, reconnect with one another, and reconnect with ourselves.

For a while, I think I lost contact with the one who God created me to be.  It wasn't intentional. I think it was cumulative over time. I just focused on what I perceived others, including God, wanted me to do.  That has begun to change and one of the vehicles of that change is kayaking.  Whitewater kayaking.

Here in the blazing heat of mid-summer in the south-central plains, such a proposition may seem like a preposterous aberration. However, there is a stretch of whitewater, about two-hundred yards long, right here in town, approximately 10 minutes from where I work.  Yes! Whitewater!  And the last two days in a row, I have kayaked that whitewater in an exhilarating splash of coolness.  It was absolutely incredible. I even let out a, "Whoop!"  It was just a little, "whoop" shared between me, a turtle, and a couple of young ducks, but it was there and it was a miracle.

This part of my story began in college. One weekend, I met my sister in Jackson Hole for a couple of days of R and R.  We rode the tram, shared an embarrassing candlelight dinner (I guess our waiter thought we were a couple...I know, Les! Eww!) and we went whitewater rafting down the Snake River! The whitewater was the highlight.  It was there, over twenty years ago, that I fell in love with the idea of kayaking.  As our big raft bobbed non-stop downstream, I noticed a grizzled guy with a grey beard plying the waves and eddies of the Snake River and I thought, "Some day, that will be me."

Well, I'm becoming a little bit grayer all the time, but work and family have grounded me in the central plains, 1039 miles from Jackson Hole.  Don't get me wrong, I love the plains. I love the 360 degree horizons and the warmth of the people. I love that hunting, fishing, and sailing opportunities abound.  However, there is no Snake River. In fact, there is barely a riffle anywhere to be found.  The rivers and streams snake slowly over horizontal horizons.  So, imagine my delight when, a couple of years ago, right here in the middle of town, the city built a boat run adjacent to a fish ladder right next to a downtown dam! Most of the locals don't know what it is, but I have been plying that crepuscular river over my lunch hour the last two days.

It is exhilarating, for sure, but also somehow coalescent with the long latent dream.

I know, it may seem inconsequential, kayaking in the mid-west, but for me, it has been a River of Delights in which God is reminding me of who I was created to be-which, in turn, makes the things I have to do so much more doable.

Church Stopping. Less doing. More kayaking.