Finding your own place in life
I haven’t done a weekend post for quite some time, but I know this next week is going to be busy. I hope you are enjoying summer and all the fun adventures that it offers. The last two weekends, my family has hit the lake. Here in Spokane when you ask someone what they are doing they will say, “going to the lake.” We have so many all around that often you don’t know which one they are heading to. Yesterday we went to Lake Pend Oreille and enjoyed the south end of the lake just south of Sand Point, Idaho.
For Father’s Day this year, Cami and the kids gave me an infatable kayak. It has been so much fun and adds another dimension to our lake trips because we are no longer land locked. We headed out yesterday looking for adventure. We were only at the beach a short time because we spent most of the day paddling around a beautiful place called Buttonhook Bay. We hiked an island, jumped off the docks, and had second thoughts about the tree swing.
The reason I’m sharing all of this with you is because it taught me a simple lesson about one’s place in life. Our camera ran out of batteries so I don’t have a photo. You’ll have to image Cami and I paddling our raft with Preslie in the front. Braunson & Beaudry our 10 year olds are on a tube that is tied to the back of our kayak. Maci and Cooper (both age 7) are also tied to our kayak, floating in a small rubber raft. We must have been quite the sight because I saw several people pointing as we floated by.
As we circled around the island, we were in a magical, beautiful place. Boats were only allowed to go 5 mph (we didn’t have a problem doing that). There were only a handful of boats and most were tied up at the dock. We had the steep, wooded mountains on three sides with the majority of the lake behind us. For a minute here and there we would just stop, float, and enjoy! The lesson was found in comparing our make-shift train of boats to the others in the bay. There were several massive sail boats, a couple double decker boats, and then some nice boats for water skiing. We seemed to be the only ones using man-power to move our boat. At first we felt quite small and out of place with the big boy boats, yet as we played and explored I was more than content to be were I was. My family was together, we were in a beautiful place, and we were enjoying each others company. The size of our boat wasn’t the focus. The manner of our movement wasn’t the focus. We focused on each other - the laughter, the deadend trails on the island, the oversized rope swing that scared me as I gave it the first test-run, and the endless dives and flips off of the dock. In a moment we could have been anywhere because we were together.
