Wait! Have you watched the video!? Watch the video until it tells you to pause before reading this!
So, here we are! Christian, Tanner, and I have been bouldering for about an hour down the river and can go no further without taking a leap of faith. We need to jump off of a 30ish foot rock into a pool of water. We decide to go for it and figure out how to get back later.
It is at this point that I need to ditch my phone, shoes, and shirt, and hide them under a shrub. We are about to jump when we notice a large rock not far under the surface of the water around where we are jumping in. We will need to jump over that rock and land on the other side in the water. Tanner runs and jumps, splash! He misses the rock and lands safely. Christian runs and takes the plunge all good. I begin to run and HALT!
The rock got in my mind and that is all I could see. It was impossible for me to look past the rock sitting there. I think we do that a lot in life. We know the fun, and adventure that lies right on the other side of danger. However, we cant look past that. We are stuck looking at the danger and it paralyzes us. Alright, back to the story. I recompose myself and take a few steps back, run, jump and touchdown. In the chilled water safe and sound. We swim to a patch of sand and continue forward.
We continue going over the large rocks for about half of a mile. We then find ourselves standing on top of a mammoth 100+ foot waterfall. We look in the distance and see an observation deck with people looking at the waterfall that we were standing on top of. They looked like little ants down there. We then remember the person at the trailhead telling us not to go too far off the paths because there are restricted areas… interesting. We accept the fact that we are probably standing in one of these ambiguous “restricted areas”.
After a while of sitting on top of the fall for a little bit taking in the size and beauty of Gods creation. We then start trekking back, and after a while we arrive at the pool of water we jumped into. We look around for a way back up and we don’t see one. After a few minutes we swim across the pool of water to the side we jumped in on and finally find a roughly 15 foot wall with a small platform roughly halfway up. This is our way out!
Tanner, and Christian give me a boost and I get situated on the small platform. I then pull Tanner up with Christian giving him a boost. Then he uses my leg as a step to get up the final 6 foot wall. Getting Christian up to the platform was more difficult with no-one at the bottom to give him a boost. Eventually we get him onto the platform and up. Christian and Tanner then take each of my hands and pull me up.
About 20 minutes and lots of scratches after we started we are finally at the top. If there was only 2 of us we would not have been able to do it. We came together and conquered the task. That is what I think God is calling the three of us to be for each other for the rest of this year.
We are called to be brothers and stand by each other. There will be times that will take the three of us working together and standing strong together in order to survive. We return to the beach where the ladies have been resting and hanging out for the 2 hours since the start of our adventure. We take a few pictures as a team and hike back up to the road where we started.
Sweet! Back to the video. Press play and finish the video!
