"What Rocks?" by Greg Duncan

This week my company was a finalist for a project that would single-handedly double our annual revenues. It’s huge, and it’s a long shot for a company our size. We only had three days to put together our final presentation for the client’s nine-person executive team. One of our founders was responsible for the big finish.

At the end of our hour-long presentation, she put up this picture which has nothing to do with custom e-learning (our business) or diversity in early childhood education (the prospective client’s business). She shared that inexperienced rafters typically focus on the rocks. It’s logical because they are dangerous and represent risk. Experienced rafters, on the other hand, focus on the water. They pay attention to the current, the depth, the flow. They make critical navigation decisions based on these things. Meanwhile, the inexperienced rafter finds himself in the rocks because that’s precisely where his focus is.

In the context of the big meeting, the point was that the client could trust us to navigate this highly complex project successfully, not by focusing on the risks but by maximizing the opportunities.

It wasn’t until later in the evening that I reflected on all the other ways that familiar analogy applies to our lives. I know people who are all about the rocks. They can tell you the different kinds of rocks, the likelihood of damage, how bad it could be, rocks they’ve narrowly avoided or are worried about. 

Rocks could take the form of poor judgement, or temptation, or even sin. They might be toxic people, or questionable habits, or __________. Your rocks are probably different from mine, but whatever they are, they’re real and they’re dangerous. Pretending they aren’t there isn’t an option. But focusing on them isn’t the solution it often appears to be.

So what is the water? Where should our focus be if not on such important things?

Namely, it’s the flowing grace of Christ. It’s the current of our faith. It’s the swelling of a meaningful worship experience. It’s the swirls of relationships in our Christian community. It’s the rising and falling of our personal prayer life and bible study. It’s the ripple of people who unexpectedly appear in our lives and the opportunities for service that come along. These things are rarely steady and smooth, or even predictable (at least for me), but they’re present. They’re available. They should be our focus. In constantly changing configurations, they are carrying us forward, past and around all those rocks -- if we allow them to guide us.

How much more joy there is in the support of flowing water, than in the risks of jagged rocks! Move over human nature. I’m going to navigate around and through the rocks not by focusing on them, but by fixing my eyes on the dynamic water that one way or another will carry me past them.

My guess is that no one sitting in that business presentation walked away pontificating about whitewater rafting in quite the way I did. But whether my company gets the big deal or not, I have a new focus on focus. What rocks? Look at those awesome rapids ahead!