September 13, 2018
The scene causes a warm smile to spread across my face each time I recall it.
Imagine running out to the lake in the middle of the night. Armed with lifejackets you aren’t going to wear, paddles that are probably going to get lost, and a bunch of college age kids surrounding you. You grab the huge metal boats lined up in a row along the shore, pull them into the water, fill each boat up with people, tell them to head out, all the while shouting and screaming and laughing about how we are all sea captains setting out for the vast ocean as boat after boat exits the cove on their own voyage.
Through all the shouts of joy and childish laughing, you hear a small voice in the middle of everything say, “Joshua!”. You ignore it at first, writing it off as a figment of your imagination, but then you hear it again. You turn from your boat that is just about to set sail as the last of the fleet hits the water and you see Bob, the director of the Joshua Wilderness Institute shouting, “Joshua!” Everyone quiets down and Bob relates to us that although we are excited, there are other people at Hume Lake that don’t want to hear a bunch of college kids shouting in the middle of the night. Makes sense. But then here comes the kicker, Bob asks, “Alright, are all of the boats here?” We all look at each other and meekishly reply, “No.” From here, Bob comes to find out that half of us have already headed out to the middle of the lake with no sense of what we are doing or the direction we are headed. Whoops.
After everyone is gathered back up to the cove, and the destination is shared, we all finally set sail. After a steep learning curve on how to paddle a boat with canoe oars, all eleven boats sit in a cluster in the middle of the lake. Bob’s voice is heard in the middle instructing us to quiet down and see what we can hear. A deer can be heard calling out to her fawn, the far-off coo of an owl can just barely be heard, and all over bats are talking with each other. Better than any of that, no cars can be heard, no sounds of the city pollute the background, and the sounds of the forest lull us into a dream-like state.
Then Bob says, “Look up.” Have you ever had a scene so absolutely perfect, so breath-takingly beautiful, so awe-inspiring, that tears fill your eyes before you know it? The night sky manages to knock the breath right out of us. As we look to the heavens, Bob begins to tell us about this being called God. He reads Psalm 19, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork…” Bob explains that everything we are seeing is God’s creation and that if we stop for a second and try to picture just how deep, how wide, and how long God’s love is for us. That it is more than the depth, the width, the length of the heavens we are looking at now. We sit there for a while in utter silence, partially at a loss for words, partially not wanting the moment to end. Later, we row back, and as the paddles work their way through the waters in the night, a shared silence is held between us all as we imagine just how big of a plan God has for our lives this year.
Written by Kyle, Hank, Kaylee, and Leyla
