Why is the river so full of fools?

Life is often compared to a great river that flows through the banks of time. Living is like navigating that river. We are born into our parents’ boats. We grow up on a river defined by our parents’ lives. If our parents have happy lives, our lives tend to have happy head starts. If our parents have lives that handle the river well, then we have good models upon which to build our own lives. But if our parents have leaky lives, we tend to spend the rest of our lives bailing.

The lives we build tend to resemble our parent’s lives; after all, we build them based upon the designs we grew up with, using whatever happened to float by. Too often, only prayer and determination hold our lives together.

Eventually, we must learn to build and navigate our own lives—often without coming ashore. If we survive, we begin to notice other individuals and we want to share a piece of ourselves with them. We get caught up in the journeys of other people, and we forget which way the river intends for us to go.

The world has become full of people building their own boats and navigating an evermore-turbulent stream. No wonder we so often crash.

We need to step back and take a look at the river; learn to read its secrets. When do we paddle hard? When do we let the currents take us? When do we pull up to the bank and survey the stream?

Based upon Lynn Marie Sager’s A River Worth Riding: Fourteen Rules for Navigating Life, this website examines fourteen rules designed to help you navigate life. Study one rule at a time, give it one week’s strict attention, and leave the rest of the rules to “their ordinary chance.” Taken together, they make for a worthwhile ride…

Click on the image above to view Cause and Effect lesson excerpts