Go with the Flow!

Tubing on a River through Rapids

The Wisdom 
of the River
"Go with the Flow"

I will never, ever forget my first experience tubing on the Haiwasee River in Tennessee.  The class 2 rapids were enough for me (scale of 1-6)...especially with The Needles, a series of drops that spanned the river...whop and over I went!  And let me tell you how cold that water was....Brrrrr!  I also found out how much it hurt to stiff-leg a rock--put your leg out there to bounce off the rocks.  You can just take that so long.  Or how about the strategy of trying to paddle across to the other side of the river?  Just go over and try it out.  Well, in my best English, it is hard as you know what to get there across the currents.  You guessed it.  By the time I got down the 5 mile stretch, I was absolutely warn out.

Getting into the River is not Easy!

 So my next time out, I brought some savy with me from the river of (literally) hard knocks.  I just went-with-the-flow.  Even right at the rocks, allowing myself to first hit and then to push off back into the main current without flinging myself into the next set of rocks.  I also learned to tube with others, latch on, so that in going over the falls, we could hold together -- much harder to tip two or three tubes over.

Bottom line here?  The river was not the adversary.  The river was the way down to the goal.

Then I thought about how many times I have struggled against the currents.  Gone solo.  Tried to stand up against the currents!  Or stiff armed life to get my own way.  The school of hard knocks! 

 Then there came the year when I was in charge of a camp staff.  How do you build team, partnership, go for the goal?  We shot the Hiawasee River!  They too learned the wisdom of the river and never forgot it all summer.  At the end of the camping season, we took our last trip down--yet to this day I remember the deepest part of the wisdom, that life itself is a river and we can trust God as we navigate it. 

There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
   the holy habitation of the Most High. 

                                                                  Psalm 46:4