Rocky Road: A Summer Adventure

I’m one of those people who tends to discover bruises or scrapes quite a while after the incident that causes them to occur.

It usually happens like this: “Oh, hey, where’d that come from?”

Yesterday, I knew where my bruises and scrapes came from.

Yesterday, my family and I took a “vacation day” to Elephant Rocks State Park and the Johnson's Shut-ins.

It was beautiful. If you haven't been, I recommend it. The scenery was astonishing, the grandeur of it all was like nothing I’d seen and we had the chance to get right in on the action.

Heights are still a bit of a challenge for me to think about, but I knew I wouldn’t regret doing a lot of climbing. I mean, it beat wall climbing in a gym - in my book, at least.

Except for when I was contemplating a far (and high) jump and my sister decides to say, “Ha, it’s like ’127 Hours.’”

Not such a good thought. And, for the record, I made the jump.

But climbing on Elephant Rocks was one thing. At the Shut-ins, there was water involved.

You see, water makes the rocks slippery. And so when you’re trying just to get out deep enough for the water to go past your knees, that becomes a challenge.

After chilling in a shallow area for a bit, my dad, sister and I decided to head down around the bend and climb the way down. 

Luckily, my dad went ahead of us most of the time, so we could follow his route. There were times when we were on dry rocks pretty high up, and other times we were climbing through rapids on those all-too-slippery rocks.

Perhaps it’s needless to say at this point, but that’s when I fell the most: in the water with a slip.

Throughout the whole time, I kept thinking how it was such an embodiment of faith. Life’s awfully rocky, and we sometimes need someone to carve the way out for us to keep us on path. Occasionally, we can climb to heights, but other times we have to jump in the deep end. We can get ahead of ourselves, lose our footing and fall. But if we don’t stop and take in the beauty every once in awhile, the journey isn’t as rewarding.

God’s beauty was all around us. He forged this little adventure for us yesterday. To me, that was pretty neat.

It didn't take much for us to get away from our overloaded schedules crammed with softball, work, school, church activities and the inability to take care of everyone and everything around us. Packing up a cooler of Snapple peach tea and a swimsuit and water shoes ended up doing the trick for a vacation for a family who couldn't get much farther away this year.

It ended up being one of my favorite "vacations."