Last week, Faith Lutheran sent four groups to the Boundary Waters in Northern Minnesota for a canoe trip.

My group included me and my ten year old son, Phin. All he wanted to do was fish. We had a guide from Camp Vermilion and six 9^th grade boys who are friends from confirmation and school.

The boys were very confident in their abilities. This overconfidence would get them in trouble.  I didn’t have to wait long to see this happen.

After portaging to our entry point, we were only a few minutes down the Little Indian Sioux River when the canoe with three boys suddenly started flooding with water.

They were sinking. Like the Titanic.

We were on calm water. No waves. Yet, they’d managed to swamp a canoe that contained our equipment pack containing all three tents.

They gathered everything up and swam towards a beaver dam where they could stand and drain the water from the canoe and return the Duluth packs.

The boys were definitely humbled by this experience and were more willing to listen.

We made camp that night on Shell Lake. When we unpacked the tents, they were drenched. We set up camp hoping they’d dry out enough before bed.

They didn’t. That night, a steady rain saturated the bottom of the tent.

I slept in a puddle. My sleeping bag absorbed water like a celery stalk until I was drenched up to my waist.

There was no way we could continue our ambitious route with wet equipment. We made a pivot. We found a site nearby, also on Shell Lake, that had a breeze and eventually, everything was dry for the following night. Thank God.

Instead of continuing to our expected exit point, however, we knew we’d have to go back out where we’d started. It wasn’t the plan, but we spent two nights on Shell and took a day trip to Devils Cascade, a scenic view of a large gorge.

You could say that our trip took us to “Shell and Back.”

The canoe guide spent time talking with the boys about radical grace and where they’d seen it on the trip.

Suddenly, grace became something more than just a churchy concept that they heard about in confirmation.

Radical grace was seeing that the swamped canoe changed our plans for the better. The boys loved having a day to go swimming and fishing. The boys loved playing pinecone home run derby, which, as you can imagine became very competitive.

The boys loved their trip. One of them said that he wanted to throw his cell phone in the lake when he got home because he enjoyed getting a break and being present with friends without distractions.  

Have you ever had plans go differently than expected? Did you handle it with grace and adapt or was it more convenient to complain and become frustrated?

This trip was a great reminder to me that living with grace is about living in the moment and appreciating the positives, especially when you’re going to Shell and back.

Pastor John wrote this article for the July 28^th, 2022 issue of the Forest Lake Times