Like a river, life is always moving. Sometimes it’s a near standstill; calm, restful, boring. Sometimes it’s like a rapid; rough, chaotic, terrifying. As you navigate life, you develop systems to help you survive, and hopefully thrive in, your unique route. You ride it out the best you can, sometimes with friends in inner tubes and a cooler nearby, sometimes alone in a raft that doesn’t seem nearly big enough or safe enough to get you through the chaos in which you’ve found yourself. Every river eventually ends and finds itself forever intertwined in a sea containing the stories of countless other rivers that have had their beginning, their journey, and their end.
How well we navigate the river depends on the systems we employ. Some folks are more organized and seem to effortlessly work the river like they’ve been down it one hundred times before. Some ride it out with their eyes shut, letting the river take them wherever it leads, trying their best to stay in the raft. When the river forks, some seek a path of adventure and others keenly calculate their route of zen. While the echoes of those who have traveled their own rivers help to guide each decision, what lies just beyond the next turn is never fully known.
Our systems give us a sense of security by overlaying an appearance of familiarity. Each time a system is utilized, the results are noted, and eventually become expected. That expectation becomes the sanity we seek when uncertainty is piqued. When faced with the unfamiliar, we seek the security of leaning on the familiar to help us navigate it, making it safely to the flats.
Sometimes our systems create more danger than safety. Rather than navigating and exiting the chaos, they keep us locked perpetually inside the rapid. It’s called a hydraulic, a continual loop under the surface of the water, typically found after a drop off in the river, where a large amount of water comes off the top of a hidden ledge, drops down deep below the surface, resurfaces a short distance away from the ledge, and is subsequently pulled back upstream toward the drop off due to the amount of water diving beneath the surface. If you were to drop a stick in it, you would see the stick disappear off the drop, be pulled under water at the bottom, pop back up to the surface a few feet/yards/meters away, travel backwards to the same drop, and repeat its journey over and over.
When you’re riding the hydraulic, the surface of the river at the top of the hydraulic can be extremely calm – some slight vibrations, but nothing of note. To the completely oblivious, you think you’ve made it through the worst. Riding the hydraulic seems like a very safe place to be – a little bubble of calm surrounded by a painful and tumultuous journey. You couldn’t be more wrong. That ignorance to reality that’s about to teach you a painful lesson when your raft turns sideways, fills with water, and the river drops you like that stick in a flash, taking you on the ride down, dragging you along the bottom, sending you back up, slamming you into the bottom of your raft that’s now stuck at the top of the hydraulic (without you in it), and then yanking you down like your feet were fitted with cement shoes only to send you back through it over and over again until it decides you’ve had enough. You didn’t have a chance to breathe before the ride started and trying to breathe during it only fills your lungs with water. It’s chaos – terrifying, uncontrollable chaos. I’ve been there many times – literally and figuratively – and so have you… at least figuratively.
A really good system can set you up for a smooth-looking ride. It puts everything on “auto pilot”, allowing you to seemingly manage the chaos surrounding you. Ultimately, you’re stuck with the only two outcomes being a purposeful reentry into the imminent chaos inside your raft and a forceful reentry into the imminent chaos outside of the raft. With enough time riding our personal hydraulic system, we eventually begin believing we can outlast the river and avoid the rapids altogether. Fear keeps us locked in. If you’re honest, you don’t know what you fear more, your system failing (with or without the raft), forcing you back into the imminent chaos you’ve tried so hard to avoid or your system succeeding, watching everyone you love move on while you remain in the same place, your view never changing as you sit in one spot watching the end of your river coming to meet you.
That fear has hit me hard as of late. My systems have allowed me to avoid life’s chaos half oblivious, enjoying the challenge and the rush, and half screaming red-faced through anger and tears, daring the end of the river to hurry its ass up and end the stalemate.
Fortunately, God has been systematically dismantling my raft piece by piece since about mid-January this year (2024). At present, He’s given me a choice; rebuild my raft, clinging to relative bearable sanity, or finish dismantling it and reenter the river with the extreme grace of being given the time to take one big deep breath before the plunge. Yeah, it’s a load of fear with excitement, sadness with hope, regret with relief, denial with acceptance. Lamentations 3:19-26 has been a longtime life mantra. It seems apropos.
Let the adventure begin.