Character is Who We Are When No One but God is Watching

 On Saturday we had the wonderful opportunity to take a canoe down the Wairau River.  One of the parents that was supervising the camp last week [Max] offered his canoe for us to use, and he would drop us off and pick us up from the river so we could have a great day of floating and fishing. Wow! How could we pass that up?!  We went to bed Friday night excited to break the "no fish" streak!

And the next day went quite differently than we had hoped...

First of all, Bryan woke up sick.  We made it over to Blenheim [where Max lived] and got about an hour of good fishing [complete with a bite!], and then a strong wind picked up and tossed the lightweight canoe all over the river - but mostly picking the rocky shores or trees to throw us into. We had to get out and empty the canoe on one occasion because we took on so much water and were sinking.  On another occasion we had to get out and pull the canoe alongside the riverbank because the wind was so strong, even with our intense paddling, we were still going upstream, backwards.  

After fighting the wind for 5 hours we finally made it to the take-out spot exhausted. Needless to say - we didn't catch any fish that day. But we did make it out alive.  And for that we are thankful.

Then to top it off, we had a tire blow out on the drive home. In the middle of a rain storm.

We had many opportunities to choose to have bad attitudes on Saturday, as the day went dramatically different than we had planned.  I can't say we had great attitudes the entire time, but we worked hard at choosing to have positive ones & making the best out of another day that God had given us, even if it wasn't quite what we hoped it would be.  :)  At the end of the day, we were proud of not necessarily what we did [canoe fishing], but how we reacted [positive attitude + teamwork] when things went awry.  A good lesson far too many of us need to work on!

We chose to have a lazy Sunday, and it was just what the doctor ordered.