Little River Trail - Towards Elkmont, TN

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.” - G.K. Chesterton

I love this quote. It’s almost as if G.K. Chesterton has been along the many trips where I’ve introduced newbies to the great outdoors. Along the way, I’ve noticed that the things in nature that annoy most people are the things that I love most about it. In a culture that demands instant-gratification, it’s nice to have something that still relies on your effort, patience, hard work, intelligence, good old-fashioned grit & character to bring out excellence. It never fails that creation wins them over eventually, but the streams and rivers, mountains & trails, fish & foul don’t make it easy. They make it good, and life was meant to be good, not easy.

• No cell phone coverage – Decompression in God’s great outdoors (away from electronic devices) is rivaled by none.

• The fish aren’t biting (aka. the fault of the angler, not the fish) – Fly fishing sounds like a great thing & most people like the idea of fishing, but it’s a different thing when you realize there is a huge amount of patience & learning involved.

• This trail is so long, when will it ever end?!! I’m so tired, my feet hurt… – A truth we can all commiserate with, but the best tasting beer (or coke) is the one that you’ve looked forward to, while trudging & sweating those few last miles of trail.

There are so many examples that this list could go on for days, but instead of rambling along any further, my take on the quote from Chesterton could best be explained by a few verses from the book of Romans.

“1Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. 3Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; 4perseverance, character; and character, hope. 5And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us. 6You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. 7Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. 8But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Romans 5 – NIV