Dropping In: Experience The Life You Were Meant To LiveSample

Keep Paddling - Living with an Eternal Perspective

It was the second day of a long prepared-for trip to El Salvador. My friends and I had been planning this trip for a year. I had been training for the long paddles and extra-long surf sessions. I was stoked to be surfing perfect waves with a good friend. 

After two hours of great waves, I paddled out to wait for another swell. A solid wave approached. I turned my board to shore, dropped in and sped down the line. At the end of the wave, my front foot slipped and I wiped out, face-planted, and tumbled toward the bottom. 

With all the speed as I wiped out, I didn’t actually penetrate the water. Instead, I skipped down the wave. As soon as I hit the water, I felt a numbing and sharp pain in my right shoulder. I remember thinking, “Uh oh, this can’t be good.” As I poked my head up for air, the wave picked me up again and threw me “over the falls.” Think of being in a washing machine with little breath - this best describes going over the falls. 

The wave let go, and I surfaced with my right shoulder severely dislocated. I was a good quarter-mile from the boat (there are no roads to this break so we hired a boat to drive us), and my shoulder felt as if  was on fire. Eventually I was able to pop my shoulder back into place and was taken back to the camp. After several hours at the hospital, I caught a taxi back to the hotel. As we bounced, quite literally, on the bumpy roads, I thought of my dream trip now becoming a disappointment. I caught the next flight home to seek medical attention.

Life throws discouragement, defeat, and disappointment all too often. In fact, life is more about living in hard times than in the good times. When things become “dislocated,” how do we continue to paddle toward God and others? 

The answer lies in our perspective. A perspective is a point of view, a particular way of thinking. Having an eternal perspective means we evaluate our values, events, beliefs, and actions from God’s point of view.

Having an eternal perspective means we recognize that everything in the present has an eternal consequence and should be evaluated within that perspective. We view the world through “spiritual eyes”, with God’s perspective.