I remember the first time I heard Rick say it: “We’ve got to get him back in the boat.”
Rick and I weren’t in a boat at the time. We weren’t standing anywhere near water. In fact, we weren’t even standing outside. He dropped this sentence while grabbing gear in an oversized closet at our church that we’ve affectionately dubbed, “the parking room.”
Rick, who started the parking team years earlier, referenced a time when we had rafted some class V whitewater together—when guys had fallen out of their rafts and drifted away from the safety of our boats. Those of us still inside our boats had fiercely worked to paddle to them and yank their frantic faces and flailing limbs out of the frigid rapids. None of us would have just left any of the guys alone to swim the rest of the deadly river.
Rick didn’t recall this memory as part of a story-sharing time around a campfire or during our weekly breakfast in the church cafe. He needed the analogy to grab my attention. One of the guys on the parking team had walked away from church and even from God. Life had thrown some very uncomfortable and difficult realities at the guy, and he decided he didn’t have room in his life for a God who claims to be good.
Rick knew the best way for our teammate to survive these life rapids was in the community of other paddlers—guys who could paddle when he needed rest breaks, guys who could make him feel part of something bigger than himself, guys who could push him to paddle harder and hang on longer.
I thought of this conversation again last week, as I paddled the Upper and Lower Gauley with three other members of the parking team and a couple of their guests. Guys got ejected from our raft several times—thankfully not in any dangerous situations. That water was 58ºF, though; and swimmers separate from the raft very quickly in whitewater currents.
I needed to see that analogy in front of my face again.
See, this past year has been the toughest of my eight years on my church’s parking team—not even close. Our team has blown up from the dozen or so when I joined the team to almost 60 men and women across what is now four service squads. People are joining the team who may not know Jesus yet or who’ve just started a committed relationship with him. Many of the new folks on the team haven’t yet participated in other Blue Ridge environments, where they can learn about Jesus and get vulnerable with other Jesus followers. And a number of guys who’ve been on the team for years are facing new tests. Recently, my other team leaders and I have come alongside two hand fulls of separate situations created by significant emotional, relational, financial, and/or spiritual upheaval.
And that’s just the dysfunction we know. Daniel, one of the other team leaders said, “Imagine what’s going on that we don’t know about yet!” We both laughed at this for catharsis, knowing we would both walk out of his shop with the weight of leadership on our shoulders—a kind of leadership outside of our career training, a kind of counseling I typically call “above my pay grade.”
I shared my heart about all of this with my pastor. He reminded me of when Moses’ father-in-law advised him to find more leaders to share the burden of leadership.
It hit me that our whitewater outfitter’s rafts each held six paddlers and a guide. Most rafting companies put no more than eight or ten passengers in their rafts, even though you could gain more financial efficiency with more paddlers per guide. It’d take the challenge and adventure out of the turbulent water. Also, it wouldn’t make sense to run whitewater in rafts of 15, 30, or 60 passengers—just from a maneuverability standpoint. If someone fell out of a boat that big, it’d be hard to move it deftly and quickly enough to get that swimmer back in the boat. However, a few small boats would be ideal for rescuing an ejected paddler; and probably no situation ever would need the whole fleet of nine or ten small boats to mobilize.
It makes sense on the river, but it’s now making sense around a parking lot.
So, that’s the direction in which the Blue Ridge Community church parking team is currently heading:
- finding more leaders in our midst,
- diversifying into nimbler, smaller boats, and
- deputizing every paddler to stop paddling long enough to get a teammate back in the boat.
Because we aren’t leaving this grand adventure, and we can’t stop people from falling out of the rafts. We just need to get them back in the boat.
