The River of Life

Pastor Jay Petrella
Graceham Moravian Church

(3/1) In some ways life seems to flow on like a river and we can approach this river of life in a couple different ways.

First you have the lazy river type of expedition. You get yourself an inner tube. You fill a cooler with delicious snacks and beverages then tie it to your inner tube. You stock up on bug spray and slather on the SPF 50. Finally, you push out into the stream and allow the water to carry you off to wherever it wills. Without any additional input from you, you hope to be carried along by the current, freeing you to doze, snack, and think about nothing in particular while on the most relaxing journey of your life.

Then again, you can have a kayak or canoe, or perhaps a flat-bottomed Jon boat complete with a motor. With these floating vehicles you have more control. Equipped with a paddle, or a motor, you can steer to get to specific places. You can choose to go up stream if you wanted. You can choose the pace at which you travel, or choose to stay in one place if you find somewhere nice you’d like to linger.

But this method requires a lot more input and effort. With the first method, most already have a cooler laying around, and if there isn’t some form of inflatable flotation device tucked away in a closet or basement, one can easily be had relatively cheap by making a quick trip to a big-box store.

However, a boat requires quite a bit more expense and planning. There might be licenses involved. It requires a means of transport, like a roof rack or trailer, which means more money and logistics. You have to find somewhere to store it when not in use. You need a boat ramp or at least some spot near a road and a shore that descends gradually into the water. With an inner tube, you can just fall into the water off some riverbank in the woods and you’re off. A boat requires bringing enough fuel or reserving enough arm strength to get you where you are going. None of this stuff concerns the chilled out individual bobbing along lazy river style.

For those of us who follow the church calendar, or lectionary cycles, the season of Lent is upon us. Lent, traditionally, is a time of self-reflection. Not that we shouldn’t self reflect throughout the entire year, but we ought to especially do so during Lent in preparation for Easter. Why is a bit of navel gazing so important? Well, I used to think that one’s life doesn’t just happen. One has to make it happen. But that’s not 100% true. Like the currents of a river, time sweeps all of us along from the beginning of our lives to the end with or without our input.

So while we all end up in the same place temporally speaking, the route we take to get to the end and the nature of the journey we take along the way are greatly impacted by the choices we make. When it comes to a river journey and our life journey, much is well outside our control, yet there is still a good bit of choice left to us, especially how we choose to react to and deal with that which is outside our control. So the lazy river style of living will just as assuredly get us to the end of our lives as living with intention will, but the journeys promise to be quite different.

Just before the season of Lent begins we have transfiguration Sunday. Long story made short, transfiguration Sunday is the day on which we read the gospel story recounting the time Jesus hikes up a mountain with a few of his disciples. While up there on the mountain top God tells these disciples to listen to Jesus.

Jesus wasn’t just some nice guy going from town to town, doing nice things for people, like serving free community dinners. He did that, but he was more than that. Jesus certainly wasn’t a ladder climbing politician, stirring the pot to grab attention, attention for the purpose of boosting him to high positions of power. He certainly had some difficult words for the religious leaders of his day, but those words weren’t spoken so he could self-aggrandize.

Jesus came to redeem us. Jesus came to show us the way to a better life, the life we were created to live. Everything Jesus did, points beyond himself to God in heaven and our relationships with each other.

Therefore, heading into Lent we have God’s voice, booming from a cloud on top of a mountain, telling the disciples gathered there, and us along with them, to listen to Jesus. To really listen to him. To heed his words and put his wisdom into practice in our day to day lives. Easier said than done.

Living the life God created us to live takes practice, intention. It also takes a lifetime. Some insights are only gained through the experience of living 30, 40, 60, 80 years, insights that might otherwise pass us by if we aren’t paying attention. Which brings me to my point.

We all need a cool, lazy river in our lives from time to time. Life is too short and precious to constantly be stressed out over schedules, achievements, striving. Still, life is too precious to be lived without intention.

Lent specifically is a season of intentional self-reflection. When we’re not paying attention, days can pass into months and even into years with little notice. Life can be crazy sometimes. In those times people can tend to just keep their heads down and plow through the busyness. Eventually though we all look up and it’s only then we realize what a great amount of time has passed. Another month has gone, another season has passed and we didn’t do the things we were wanting to do, things we fully intended to do, but life somehow got away from us. Another decade somehow slipped away unnoticed, and we’re not yet the people we wanted to become. How could that be, for we had the best of intentions?

So it can go with our relationship with God. We can hop from Sunday to Sunday out of habit and routine, without much thought. We can get so wrapped up in the comings and goings of our days, that we put off prayer and meditation, fellowship and bible study. Then at some point we look up from our busy lives and realize we aren’t as close to God or each other as we’d like to be and we wonder where all that time went.

There is a time and a beauty to the inflatable raft on a lazy river carting us along. But may we all take the opportunity presented by this Lenten season to step out of the inner tube and into the intentionality of the canoe. May we look up from life’s cooler and find our bearings, plot a course to a deeper faith and row with purpose. Reflect on life and the events that brought you to where you are now, and listen to Jesus, the Son of God to guide you on the next leg of your lie’s journey.