Why God's Sovereignty Needed a Jet Boat

My church’s video team asked me to assist them with a short film that will show during our Easter weekend services. I won’t give away the plot, but the central scene involves a whitewater rafting sequence. The multi-faceted production crew brought a lot of talent and expertise to the shoot, but they wanted my whitewater experience to make it more authentic.

I told my clients and others that I was the safety coordinator for the shoot, which was true in the water. It was more of a logistics and consulting gig at first, and then I became one of the characters in the story. Then, I became a real whitewater rafting guide—for the first time in my life.

That’s not why I’m telling this story, though. While shooting this river video, I encountered God in a way I don’t want to forget. His story deserves to be told.

We were within a a few takes from wrapping the whitewater scene, when we accidentally punctured our only raft (borrowed from our pastor). I jumped to hold my thumb over the hole and then handed that duty off to Kevin.

Thankfully, we had a foot pump and a roll of heavy duty tape on the shore. One problem, though: we were at least half a football field downstream from the boat launch. Logan, the producer, had stayed there to guard the remaining expensive gear that we hadn’t ferried out to boulders in the middle of the river. That archipelago of rocks sat squarely between two class II rapids, making yelling almost fruitless.

I slid into the river, pushed against the current, and signaled to Logan, who ran to the nearest bank to make sense of our yelling. He ran back to the gear, scrounged the requested items, and handed them to a kayaker who just happened to be launching his kayak at that exact moment. Once those were delivered to us, we exhausted all of the tape. The good news: the air wasn’t leaking as quickly as it had been. The bad news: the raft had to be inflated again between each take (and was pretty flimsy by the time the director yelled, “Cut!”).

We didn’t have the most critical shots yet—the ones that captured the climax of the narrative. So, we had to keep shooting. Each take seemed to suck more air out of the raft. Poor Kevin got quite the leg workout between shots. We never did get one of the setup shots that Josh wanted; but we eventually had enough in the can to make the scene work.

The drama wasn’t over yet, though.

We had four actors with life jackets & paddles, the drone pilot, the camera man, the director, and a cache of equipment to get upstream to the takeout. We had a punctured four-person raft and a single dry bag. We had Maury River water as cold as you would expect in the mountains in early March and only us actors in thermal gear. Oh, and we had a current trying to decide between two rapids that would both send us farther downstream from our goal—and out into the deeper, mightier James River.

By this time, the seal on the foot pump had broken, and Kevin had to hold the pump together with his hand as he pushed it with his foot. He kept pumping until we had the production crew and the lighter two actors in the raft. Then, Kevin and I waded into the stream, pushing the shrinking raft a few inches at a time toward the boat ramp. Our prospects for getting there looked grim.

At that very moment, Mason Basten, the rugged co-founder of River Road Jet Boats just so happened to be joy riding up the James River with his kids in his prototype whitewater boat. When he saw us in the water next to the raft, he assumed Kevin and I were with the swift water rescue team. So, he turned his bow toward the Maury River, revved his Mercury outboard, and powered up the confluence rapid to our sad state of affairs.

Within seconds, he had tossed us his throw bag. Within a couple minutes, the production crew was unloading at the boat launch. I chatted with Mason for a bit about river conditions and joined in the voices of gratitude. After he pulled away from us, I said something to the boys about guardian angels not looking like you’d expect.

I don’t know what would’ve happened Saturday, if God hadn’t sent an innovative river rat to us at our exact moment of need. But I don’t think the encounter was an accident. We had been filming for hours at that point. Had Mason passed us any earlier, he wouldn’t have seen anyone in need of assistance. Had he arrived any later, he may have been rescuing us in a more perilous situation. Mason told me that he had come within a physical inch of capsizing that same jet boat at Balcony Falls earlier that week during his own video shoot. Maybe God spared him there so that he could spare us.

None of us will ever know.

What I do know is that we’re going to have scores—if not hundreds—of guests next weekend. (Our church attendance jumps by hundreds every Easter.) A lot of those people try our church because it’s less boring than many of the local traditional assemblies. And almost all of those folks will see a short film that almost didn’t get finished—a movie I can’t wait to see.

It will get thousands of views on Facebook, if past videos are any indication. Blue Ridgers will rightfully brag about our talented director, producer, cameramen, and sound guys. I’ll probably watch it a couple dozen times, like I normally do.

But the story I’ll remember most won’t be the one on the screen. It’ll be the one God wrote and directed behind the scenes. A story of rescue, a tale of sovereignty. That’s the story he’s been telling since before the origin of Easter—the overarching story of human history since Adam and Eve caused the need for Easter.

It’s his story and our story. It just so happens that story now includes a jet boat.