RoadrunnerDid I ever tell you how I ended up wrapped around a tree branch with kayak over my head?

It happened in a flash on Phoenix’s Salt River, on a day with high water and a strong current. I wasn’t watching what I was doing and suddenly I didn’t have the time or strength to pull away from a large, well-established tree. Normally the tree would be on an unapproachable island in the middle of the channel, but the unusually high water had submerged the island, and the tree’s bottom branches were only a few feet above the river.

A large, horizontal, skull-cracking tree limb loomed in front of me. I managed to use my paddle and one of my legs to slow down on some friendlier small branches.  But I thought, if I can just get my arms up over the nasty branch, with my head and chin over the top like I’m on the playground monkey bars, I can stop the kayak.

That worked for 2.5 seconds.  Then the relentless river current torpedoed the kayak forward. But rocks and tree branches in front of me halted its trajectory and it flipped upside down — into the tree, over my head.  At that point, wearing a kayak for a hat and literally up a creek without a paddle,  I thought, well, it’s time to let go. I don’t want to be knocked unconscious by the kayak if it decides to move. The water was only a few feet deep but the current was too strong for me to stand up.

So I slipped under the branch, pointed my feet downstream, and rode the rapids belly-up like an otter through a gorgeous piece of US national forest. I love water and felt safer there than being wrapped in a potential fiberglass kayak casket. About a half mile until I came to a placid pool, where my friend Mary helped me get out of the frigid snow-melt-swollen river.

I told my sister about it later and she said, “Yeah, you were a victim of roadrunner physics. Your brain thinks ‘I can stop that kayak by hanging on to that tree’ but there is no way your body can win against a gazillion tons of water force on the kayak.”

We all laughed at the Roadrunner/Coyote cartoons and their fanciful renderings of the laws of physics. Lately I’m realizing though how much I seem to think life is going to end up like a Warner Brothers animated feature.  The laws of physics, laws of life, aren’t going to apply to me.

Today (Wednesday) I drove to work in rush-hour traffic.  As I rounded the Northern Avenue bend on the 51 southbound, the red brake lights blossomed.  People started cutting in and out of lanes, hedging bets on which line would move the fastest. I played the “pick a pace car” game and started watching this garish yellow monster truck in the lane to my right.  You’ve done it too. If he goes faster than me, I’ll change lanes.

I’ve played the “pace car” game three mornings in a row and all three times, even if the car zoomed ahead to the point I couldn’t see it, we caught up again just after the Camelback exit. With multiple lane changes I never shave more than 2 minutes off my travel time. Two minutes. 120 seconds.

But my roadrunner physics brain says if I’m weaving lane to lane, I’ve arrived faster, even if the clock and the scary yellow pace truck say, hmmm, not really sweetie.

Then at work, I plan my to-do list quickly before our weekly Food for the Hungry staff chapel. I make promises to people whose emails dropped in my box overnight from around the world.  Then, I hit three hours of regularly scheduled weekly meetings. Every Wednesday. And for some odd reason by the time noon hits I’m stressing because I got nothing done all morning. Well duh, you had three hours of meetings. Roadrunner physics though makes my brain think it can somehow clean out the in-box without touching the laptop.

I take a little comfort in seeing that a few thousand years ago, the Bible talks about plenty of people who were roadrunner physics fans. I’m reading the beginning of Exodus and Pharaoh certainly qualifies. How could you possibly think you have more power than God?

At the same time, I wonder if perhaps God wired us to have just a little roadrunner in us.  There’s an deep, instinctive desire to overcome, to beat the odds, that will overwhelm our intellectual understanding of what’s possible according to our own puny experience.  We just get sidetracked on the best way to use our wiring.  Moses got it, eventually.  God kept telling Moses He would defy everything that sane people understood to be true.   In Exodus 7:4 God tells Moses: “I will lay my hand on Egypt and I will bring out my divisions, my people the Israelites.”  What, the slave nation of Israel will become like an army and march itself out of Egypt?  Definitely a roadrunner moment. For a time, at least, Moses applied his God-given ability to believe the impossible and became a mighty weapon for change.  He listened and believed when God said, I’m the creator of the universe, I get to make the laws here.  Conversely when I divorce my belief in the impossible from God’s will and plan, I end up with a kayak over my head.

Lessons: Use the brain God gave you and stay connected to Him when the current sucks you into chaos.  Quit looking for pace cars and pay attention to the verse of the day on the radio with contentment.  Do you think God would rather you clean out the in box or join your colleagues in prayer, praise and bonding in chapel?  Stick with God and see “natural law” wielded in wonderfully weird ways by the One who created it in the first place, for His purposes.

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