Marilyn and I had a great time together at White Lake PRAYING and Planning for the ministry of He’s SPEAKING! Are we LISTENING? We felt the presence of God guiding our thoughts and actions. One exciting thing we did was PRAY and Paddle. Marilyn has a paddle boat and together we paddled around the lake praying together all the way.
Here are Marilyn's thoughts about our paddling excursion:
As we paddled along God continued to illustrate lessons about our relationship with Him and each other.
While we both paddled together, the trip was fairly smooth. But we noticed how hard it was when only one of us was paddling….the strain on our muscles, the unevenness of our forward movement. That is the way it is with our walk with God. When we are on board with him, he helps us with our journey. But when we try to do it alone, it becomes difficult and frustrating.
As we paddled along, we kept thinking of different analogies of our paddle boat ride.
Here are Marilyn's thoughts about our paddling excursion:
As we paddled along God continued to illustrate lessons about our relationship with Him and each other.
While we both paddled together, the trip was fairly smooth. But we noticed how hard it was when only one of us was paddling….the strain on our muscles, the unevenness of our forward movement. That is the way it is with our walk with God. When we are on board with him, he helps us with our journey. But when we try to do it alone, it becomes difficult and frustrating.
As we paddled along, we kept thinking of different analogies of our paddle boat ride.
The wind started to pick up and the waves got higher…this made our trip slower and more difficult when we were paddling. As we were crossing the waves there were times that it seemed we were getting nowhere, but as we paddled together we got through the waves.
We decided to see what it would be like to have only one person paddle through the waves….not pleasant as now we not only had to battle the waves alone, but carry the other’s weight and work was twice as hard. We found ourselves going forward and then backward a little as the wind would catch us. That is the way life can be – but as we paddled together we continued to move forward… but when one of us stopped paddling, the other could not keep a constant forward movement. We also noticed if we approached the waves in a certain way the ride wasn’t as rough. When God is our captain, he gets us through the waves…it may be bumpy, but we know we will be able to overcome with God’s direction.
We also noticed that when we had the wind at our back….we had easy forward movement and we certainly liked this time as we could relax and put our feet up and float along the water.
We also saw God’s beautiful creation all around us…the trees, birds, flowers, fish, frogs, sky, and clouds….. then we saw the most beautiful sight……diamonds twinkling on the lake as the sun kissed the water. We were totally blessed.
There were so many illustration of God’s love on our paddle boat ride…we shall never forget.
Robin's thougths:
The most important lessons we learned on this Board retreat: Everything we do MUST begin with PRAYER. We have always believed this, but we experienced this first hand on our trip. We also realized that with one person, little can be accomplished, with two even more can be accomplished. I am so excited. We now have eight different people helping us in different ways. Can you imagine how much can be accomplished with all of us working together?
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