God interrupts me

I’M DRIVING ALONG, eager to get home. I need to finish that hour-long video. It had been a pain in the neck. It’s B-roll footage I shot recently in the Northwest. I hope to use it in future videos. But it has some problems.

I had no plan to interrupt that work for another video project…all the while, I’m trying to finish Revelation for the Casual English Bible.

My phone was playing music through the car audio system. Along comes “You raise me up,” sung by a Christian trio called Selah.

Well, I had just gotten back from a trip to the Great Northwest. I shot scenic video backgrounds in the mountains around Seattle and up at Whistler Mountain in British Columbia.

Flashback

Ten years ago this summer, I broke some bones mountain biking with my son on Whistler Mountain. Two Kansas boys had decided they could handle Extreme Mountain Biking. I was treating my son to a father/son trip, celebrating his graduation from college and the launching of his own marketing business.

I flew over the handlebars of my bike on what amounts to the Bunny Hill.

Oh the shame of it.

Broke a collar bone. Didn’t know it. Thought I pulled a muscle.

So, I had my son help me with some arm-stretching exercises.

It wasn’t our best moment, but perhaps our most macho.

That is, until we took the series of bike lifts…I think three different lifts…to the top of the mountain and rode the twirling trails to the end of my journey.

Broke the other collar bone. And a smattering of rib bones.

Punctured a lung. I expected to get up and go back to vacationing after a doc in training poked a drain hole into my left lung.

The docs in the ER said morphine was a better choice.

Back to now

This summer also marked my 40th wedding anniversary. So, in a sentimental mood, I brought my wife back to Whistler with me. My son and his family came along. Actually, it was my son’s idea.

I took video and pictures of his family on the trip.

Captured on video, there’s a moment when we are riding on a cable ride above the rugged biking trails. My wife told our three-year-old granddaughter that her daddy rode on the trail below.

She looked down and then she looked up. She said, “Grandpa broke his body.”

Yeah, I guess so.

What was supposed to be a father/son trip became a mother/son trip. My wife’s a nurse, so when she heard my son say “chest tube,” she caught the first available flight to Vancouver.

The two of them enjoyed the scenic train ride from Vancouver to Whistler, to retrieve our rental car. They saw a bear catch a fish in a mountain stream.

They rubbed it in.

I was hoping to get to ride the train on this trip. The short ride doesn’t exist anymore.

Back to the song

Anyway, I was listening to the song and pictures of the trip started popping into my head.

“I need to make this video,” my head seemed to say to itself.

I felt this strongly enough that I put my other work aside.

I can’t be sure God had anything to do with it. But because I find the video heartwarming, I figure if anybody inspired me to put this together, at least it wasn’t Satan.

I don’t normally put my family out there like this. I create family videos a fair amount, but I keep them unlisted in the cloud or on YouTube.

But I felt something special about this one. I think they do, too, because they gave me their permission to take this public.

You’re public. Here’s the link.

Northwest Passage

Casual English Bible
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