Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy

Welcome to Day 102 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.

This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom.

Life is Like a River

Thank you for joining us for our 7 day a week, 7 minutes of wisdom podcast. This is Day 102 of our Trek.Yesterday we studied a couple of analogies of how life is like a clock.  I trust that you will allow these wisdom morsels to permeate you and help you to gain insight and understanding. As you do gain this wisdom, insight, and understanding as water flows in a river, let it flow through you to impact others in your world.  This brings us to our focus for today as we compare how life is like a river.

As I will mention each day this month, in celebration of passing the milestone of our 100th Day on our Wisdom-Trek, we have a special gift that we will be giving out to 7 of our fellow trekkers to show our appreciation to our faithful team members. On October 5th, we will have a drawing in which we will be giving away 7 Wisdom-Trek t-shirts. There is an entry form on the main Base Camp page of Wisdom-Trek.com, where you can enter once per day throughout the month of September. Thank you so much for coming along with us each day on our Wisdom-Trek.

We are recording our podcast from our studio at The Big House in Marietta, Ohio. I was able to start coating the woodwork in our dining room this morning. Although I did not make a lot of progress in the short time I was able to spend on it, I did make progress, and for that, I am thankful.

It was a busy day of work today with several projects competing for the limited time that seems to rush by so quickly. I personally can’t imagine having a day of work that drags on just waiting for it to be over.  Although I know accomplish much, my daily to-do list remains about the same length each day. I have always joked that I will live to 125, and I am not sure that is even enough time to get everything done I would like to do in life. While I do have many hectic and stressful days, I am grateful to be busy.

That is enough about my work. It is time to break camp and head out on our Trek. We travel a considerable distance, and as we continue on, we head down into a deep gorge on a long and very steep trail. As we near the bottom of the trail, we start to hear a rushing river. As we descend further, we come around a bend in the trail and see a beautiful river flowing swiftly before us.   Since we have been hiking now for several hours, we find a clearing to stop for a meal. As we are resting and gaining nourishment, we explore how life is like a river.

All rivers start as a few drops of rain. In comparison, our birth is like the formation of a spring on a hillside, which has gathered its water from the rain or snowmelt trickling off the mountain slopes.

As a child grows from an infant to toddler and begins to jabber, so is the babbling of a brook as it gains both volume and intensity. Before long, the child is growing and gaining traits that he will carry throughout his life. The brook expands into a creek with more of a defined course that it follows, leaving its mark everywhere it flows.

As our children grow into their teen years they begin to show their independence from their youth, and they seem to be always on the go. In the same way, the creeks come together to form the rivers that cascade over rocks and trees, forming rushing waters and rapids that are difficult to navigate. Like these streams and rivers, they encounter obstacles and challenges but learn to overcome these obstacles by wearing them down or finding a path around or through them.

Even as we grow into adults, at times there are massive floods, huge waterfalls, and raging rapids. We also learn that there are the periods of smooth and peaceful flo...