Rapids, Snakes, Broken bones. I loved it.

I was poking through my journal the other day and discovered it was a year ago this week that we discovered we'd be losing our jobs at The Fish. It's been quite a year since then. A bout of unemployment, a career transition, and a new economic reality have made these last 12 months a time that I would just as soon forget.

Or would I?

I'm not a fan of canoeing---especially going through rapids. Too unpredictable and the consequences (dumping in the river) aren't very enjoyable. I look at these last 12 months as shooting the rapids. Life is like that river---one minute you're paddling along nicely enjoying the water and admiring the scenery---then the sound of roaring rapids reaches your ears and you know you're in for a bumpy--and possibly--wet ride.

Years back when I was on an Outward Bound expedition, our little band of smelly backpackers reached the river for our canoe portion. We loaded up and paddled on. My partner and I probably made the first set of rapids just fine, but we dumped our canoe soon after. A bunch of us did, in fact, one guy broke his tailbone slamming into a rock. Later, we dumped again and we came close to drowning (that's another story for another time). This wasn't long after the guides told us not to get too close to the branches overhanging the river as cottonmouth water moccasins could occasionally drop into the canoes. Fun.

Crappy experience, right? Yes---but it's one of my sharper memories of that trip. I remember that feeling of the canoe going over and that water soaking me. But what I remember more clearly is our response to that semi-crisis. We banded together. We helped each other. We got through it.

I've written about this before but it bears repeating. We hit bumpy roads and rocky times but these things are no surprise to the one who ordains our comings and goings. It's not breaking news to God when we hit these patches. He's got it figured out. We need to take these rattles and shakes and falls and collisions as a hard-to-understand but wonderful-to-behold path that He has placed us on.

Jesus knew it. It's a hair out of context, but in John 16:33 He says, "I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world."

We're in the rapids right now. If we're going to get wet, let's get wet. Someone will be there to help.

And, if anything---getting in that river cleaned a little of the trail grime off us. We were a lot less stinky after the river.