Focus... on the water, and in the church

Bridal Veil and Focus
Bridal Veil Rapid is one of the funnest rapids in Tallulah Gorge. It's about a 40 foot waterfall slide. It's class V because of the hydraulic at the bottom. This is a keeper hydraulic that could one day be fatal for somebody. It's eating water back into itself from about 10 or 15 feet out from the fold. Getting out if you got in there would be very very hard. The irony is that it's a super EASY rapid to run. You only goal really is to keep a left angle on your boat to punch the very left of the hole and keep paddling all the way left out at the bottom.

From the top river left eddy, you can't see the drop in your boat because it's such a steep drop. All you can really see are some distant trees on the left bank and the start of the next rapid some 50 yards downstream. So my friends Ben and Wes told me, "You see that poplar tree on the left bank that's leaning to the left? All you want to do is aim for that. The drop is easy, consequences severe if missed. Just keep you boat aimed to that tree."

Focus!!! Don't look at the hole at the very top. Enjoy the roostertail on the way down but don't let it throw you or distract you. The keeper hydraulic at the bottom will beckon to you. Don't let it hold you attention. Don't let it intimidate you and get you off your line. Just keep paddling toward your goal. Don't let anything else eat you attention from that goal and purpose! Aim for the tree and keep paddling!

Bridal Veil more than alot of rapids epitomizes this idea of focus. There really is only ONE GOAL with Bridal Veil. STAY LEFT!!! Alot of rapids can be broken down into multiple moves with multiple lines and different steps in getting to the bottom. Boof the pourover, hit the eddy, peel out and ferry past the wave train, drive right and boof again! Not Bridal Veil! Drive left... That's it!

With so many things that seem to get complicated and take the simplicity out of everything, I really appreciate the lesson of Bridal Veil. Now let's look ahead at church.

Church and Focus

Several different teaching elements lately have converged in my life to teach me about focus. The book "Simple Church" by Rainer and Geiger, some teaching by Andy Stanley, and some good conversations with Craig Gentry have come together with thinking about Bridal Veil to drive the point home.

On Wednesday night, Summit has one job! Make disciples! Too vague? OK. Let's focus this statement into something managable for everybody. Here is what we have: Community Groups meeting with leaders on the second and third Wednesday nights of the month. The other night two nights of the month we will generally have a speaker focused on whatever teaching element we are going through.

Here's our focus! It's the focus of the speakers, the focus of the worship band, the focus of our student leaders involved in the program, and the focus of our Community Group leaders. To involve the students in the community groups in an open honest discussion about spiritual things and how they relate to their life. That's the tree we are aiming for! That's the bottom of Bridal Veil for us: To involve the students in the community groups in an open and honest discussion about spiritual things and how they relate to their life.

So, CG leaders, we've done our training, we've gone over to some degree the teaching focus for the semester. But my question to you is this: Do you know the tree your aiming for? Is anything else pulling your line from that path on Wednesday nights? Are there other great things we could be doing on Wednesday nights? How about serving other? What about mentoring of younger students by older students? How about digging into some memorization techniques of the Bible? All great things. But they are not our focus on Wednesday nights in Summit. Those will take us off line and maybe into the keeper hydraulic. Those are not our tree.

Our tree, your tree, the tree we' are aiming for on Wednesday nights that will get us to the bottom of the rapid is to involve students in the community groups in an open and honest discussion about spiritual things and how they relate to their life.

"Compromise" is on the plate for January. Let's have some incredible Community Groups!

Dennis

Christmas and Germs

Yep that's right germs! Parker's nose has been running like a freight train (no fever though)... Mac on the other hand spiked a 103 on the thermometer... Deidre and I both have the runny nose, stuffy headed goodness... and Emma-Claire has staph (scary word) on the inside of her leg where her diaper has rubbed against it. Suffice it to say that Doctor Kahn felt horrible for us and sent us home to eat ice cream.

She told Deidre and I to drink plenty of fluids, gave us some cream to fight the infection on Emma-Claire's leg which was already diminishing anyway, tested Mac for strep and the flu (negative on both, so just give him tylenol and let it run it's course), and try to keep Parker happy... Wow what a Christmas! I am looking forward to going to the Christmas dinner at church tonight with Parker though!

We did get our kid's Christmas pictures done!

www.thesummityouth.org

Check out what Trey Greer has put together for Summit Youth. I'm so glad God let's Trey use what he knows to serve us. For those of you that missed it in the title, that's www.thesummityouth.org There's a link to the right on this blog. Be sure and put it in your favorites as well and check back often.

Dennis

High Water at Amicalola

Emma-Claire finally was sleeping on Thursday and Deidre told me to leave the house for a while and let her sleep. Knowing that it had been raining like cats and dogs, I took the short trip over to Amicalola Creek. Looking at the online gauge it looked like it topped out early that morning around 1.7 (pretty respectable). I knew at that level the playspot above the bridge would have some great waves to surf behind the main hydraulic. Below are some pictures from earlier in the summer at about the same level. The first one is me surfing in the hydraulic. Above about 1.3 the cant eddy into it... you have to start above the rapid and run it backwards and catch the surf on the fly (very worth it) because the eddy that would give service to this feature gets pushed downstream. The other picture is actually the better reason to go there when it hits above 1.5 on the online gauge. There are two to three beautiful glassy waves with perfect troughs that develop behind the main hole. And the eddy that usually feeds the main hole gives PERFECT accessibility to these waves. These waves, to varying degrees, are unbelievable surfing up to about 2.5???































On the trip with my brother-in-law Chris, we decided that if rain was consistent and this watershed could actually hold onto some water instead of spiking like it does in this drought, this could be one of the best playspots in North Georgia. I mean these are actual WAVES and not just surging hydraulics... and I had always rather surf something glassy than foamy. Let's see what weather patterns do over the next few years and we'll see if we could be right.



































I really had some fun surfing on Thursday! The other thing that was really fun on Thursday was paddling down to "Edge of the World". Between 1.2 (maybe) and 2.???? this double drop, (or triple drop, depending on how you count) is class IV. The highest I've run it was maybe 1.3. So I wanted to check it out and see what was going on.

I was BLOWN AWAY when I paddled past the bridge gauge though. When I put on a couple of hours earlier, it read 1.7. Now the river had flashed to 2.3 in just an hour and a half! I quickly did a little math in my head:

Creek Boat = at home in my garage
smaller playboat that surfs awesome, but has issues in bigger water = under me
Edge of the World at 2.3 = if ran today with no paddling partners, would likely eat my lunch!

I still wanted to check it out at this level and decide when I got down there though. So I headed downstream. Here are some pictures of "Edge" at about 1.8-2.0 to give you some perspective.
This picture above shows the classic line for the first drop.





















What I usually do is drop in clean headed river left over the pourover in the left of the picture. Your goal is to hit the far river left eddy right above this undercut (wow that's a little scary, going under there couldn't be fun). Now take a look below at the boat breaker rock covered up with water....




















This is right below the undercut rock. You can see the bottom of the undercut in the upper right of the picture above. So from the river left eddy you need to ferry from river left, above the undercut, above the boat breaker drop, all the way river right to...

...the last drop (that I don't have a picture of). It is to the far river right of what you see above. At normal levels it's a beautiful 4 foot drop over a rock shelf. At 2-2.3 it is what made me walk away without running it on Thursday. The hydraulic that it was creating was MASSIVE. It was literally pulling water back into itself from a good 7-9 feet away from the drop. I couldn't see the far right side of the drop, but I thought that if it looked anywhere as mean as this side of the drop, I'd have some work to do to claw my way out if i got stuck in there. Again, playboat.... big hole... not happening. I kept telling myself that if I had my creekboat... or if I had some reliable partners for some safety... or if... if... if... Maybe when it rains again, we'll see.

Dennis

To Parents and Students of Summit and Food for Thought

Blown away is an understatement for what happened to me last week! Yep I'm talking about the birth of Emma-Claire, but that's not all. I was astounded at Parker (my 16 month old)!!! What I witnessed of him brought something crystal clear to my mind that I've taught fairly recently in Summit.

I went to the hospital with D and Saturday night she had Emma-Claire via C-Section. It was awesome and exhausting and amazing.Monday night Deidre's mom came to stay with her in the hospital while I went to get Mac and Parker and stay with them at home Monday night. Michael to me looked the same as he did Saturday morning when we left him with some friends. What hit me like a ton of bricks was when I picked Parker up from my mom and dad's. I promise you I left a baby boy at their house. He was a baby! I had watched him grow up for the past 16 months and I know what he looked like when I dropped him off.

I was unbelievably shocked when I picked him though. He was not a baby anymore, but all of sudden with new eyes and a new perspective of looking at 7lb. 6oz. Emma Claire, I picked up this little boy that seemed huge and growing and looking more and more like Michael than a baby. It was even more surreal when I got both the boys home! Mac and Parker were playing on the floor together wrestling around and chasing each other down the hall. The week before when Mac was playing him, it was a big brother and a BABY BOY that were playing. But now out of nowhere, when they were playing together, it looked like Mac and a BIG BOY playing together.

Now I know that in the course of 3 days, Parker didn't automatically turn into this little man. I realize that I had just spent a couple of days with an honest to goodness baby and that because of that my perception of how big Parker actually is changed. He had already been that big, but because I had seen him everyday growing, I hadn't noticed him changing. He still was a baby boy to me.

Alot of you guys are like Parker. You have been in the process of growing up spiritually. And growing into mature disciples doesn't happen in three days. It's a process! Where were you in your walk with Christ 16 months ago? Where are you know? Are you growing? Parent's are you helping your students to get in the PROCESS of growing into disciples for Jesus?

Dennis