Pacific Yew | pacific yew | By CDA Adventist | That can really help us if you want to update your phone number, Email, or address, or mailing address, or if you have a question, a prayer request, want to get involved in a ministry that it really helps our, our, that really helps our team connect with you. And if you, and if you fill it out and tear it off, you can leave it at the church office in the foyer. As many of you know, this is a Pacific U weekend. Uh, once a quarter, our church hosts a visiting scholar, and we have a mini seminar. This weekend has provided some unique and unprecedented challenges due to kind of a domino of events involving weather, flight delays, and a lot of other things. Our speaker is not here in person this weekend. For a first time, we're actually doing it by live stream. So, we didn't have a session last night and Doctor Michelle Sunley live streamed the Sabbath School session which is available online. If you want to watch it, if you missed it or if you want to share it. Uh it be live streaming in for the sermon. Find following church, we will have our regular, wonderful fellowship lunch. Uh Alyssa and Summer and their teams have been working really hard over there making the lunch. There's tons of food. Please come and since we're not having an afternoon session, we'll have plenty of time to sit and talk and have fellowship and have seconds and thirds. Um and so please come for lunch. We have lots of food and summer had has herbs as part of the decorations. And so if you'd like to take an herb home and help buy one to help offset some of the cost. Please see summer there. Some of us have reserved them but if you didn't and would like some, please see Summer. Um as I said, following the fellowship lunch, there will be no afternoon session just because of all of the changes. Doctor Michelle Sunley, she's a professor of history at Southern. She she trained at Stanford University and University of Texas at Austin in religious histories with an emphasis in the 1800s in the Americas. One of the really neat things about her is is she really has a a passion for the everyday Christian and the Christian experience and what were Christians struggling with and how did their Christianity inform their faith and how they interacted with society. So, that's that's her interest and that's really an area where there hasn't been a lot of research. So, it's really need to learn from her about how did Adventist fit into the broader Christian movement, how did their Christianity and belief and picture of god inform how they view gender, race, war, slavery, all of different things. So, definitely a lot to learn from her about about god and about how he can lead in our lives and then, praying for comfort. As many of you know, Joyce and Matthew Esselbach. Joyce's father-in-law, Jeff Baxter, passed away following complications of of emergency brain surgery. Um we want to lift up Elise, his family, Joyce and Matthew Esselbach and their extended families. Please just keep them in your prayers for god's comfort and strength and help them to support each other and as a community, we want to support them. Uh please reach out and condolences cards and just lift them up in your prayers. Our offering today is for the Upper Columbia Advance which supports evangelism, youth programming, schools, churches across upper Columbia conference. As usual, you can either do that online or you can do it in the boxes in the back. And Ruthie today will be doing our children's story. So kids, you can collect the children's offering. Thank you. Start like that Long time ago, when my boys were ages wrapping drip. Now, trips are pretty fun fun when you have friends with you Well, this was called the middle fork of the salmon river I'm like an adventure and and because some of our best friends were going with us where your Now, most of us panel becomes lazy river trips like around here, the river, the Sultan River. Depending on the time of the year, you just it's just comfortable to go on the river North Middleport of the Salmon River So, we all decided that we were going to plan and it was going to be not only one day, it's going to be you might ask. Well, the only way for Going downhill. And flashing up against Walton and the water starts looking like waves in the ocean and it's white, right? White water rafting. Alright. So, we decided to do this and we had to get a bunch of wraps and each wrap can hold about four people comfortably but when you on a, oh, how many of you have gone camping? Okay, when you go camping, you take stuff with you, right? So, not only did we have to have enough rafts to hold all of the people, we had to have enough rest to hold all of our stuff and that was for 7 days and I don't know if I mentioned there were almost 30 of us. 30 people times seven days, you can imagine. We had food, pots, pens, pens, sleeping bags, and medical emergency supplies and not to forget the most important thing, toilet paper. You have to think of all these things that you're going to use for those 7 days. and everything you take on a river trip, you pack it in and you pack it out. That means every piece of garbage you generate, you have to take it with you back down the river. Nothing is left behind. So, we planned as best we could to take only the essentials that we would need. So, in August, 1998. That's like before the turn of the century, we packed up our trailer full of rock and things that we would need and drove several hours to where we would start our river trip adventure. Once we got all of the rafts ready, aired up, and with all this stuff securely fastened in them, we, there was a river ranger who had us all gathered together just like you're on the the the stand here. You we were on the beach. Ready to go onto the river. And we had to listen to very important instructions. Because the river guides tells you the river guideline, River Rangers tell you the river guidelines and safety instructions. Now, most of the people that were planning this trip had been down this river before, they knew what to expect but there were many of us who had never taken a trip like this before and while the river ranger was talking to us, I began to think, oh my goodness, what did we sign up for here? This is Starting to sound scary and I did not sign up for scary. I was a little worried. But what could I do? We were ready to go. And I looked down at Reuben who is 10 years old. And here he is drawing with a stick in the sand. And I said Reuben are you listening to this? This is really important. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm listening, he said. Oh, dear I was really worried for him, but for my other boy, and for all of us and then I looked at Reuben. He had, let's see if we could see a picture. He had his helmet on. He had his life jacket on. He had his swimming trunks on and he had his water shoes on. He looked like he was ready to go on a river trip. So did all the rest of us. So, we're ready to go, I guess. But let's see. Oh then, I forgot this part. We decided that we really didn't know what we were doing and Reuben, he was one of the younger people on the trip and Myrna Cummings was one of the older people on the trip. Well, we put them with Bob because Bob was an experienced horseman. He'd been on the river before and we wanted them to be especially safe, right? So, we, this is Bob, Myrna, Ruben. Don't they look happy? So, we start taking off. And we did a few hours into the trip, we come across, oh, I forgot one of the important thing. So, the River Guide gave us instructions and also gave us a map and the map shows the twists and the turns in the river and when you're getting close to a rapid, what's a rapid? It gets flowing really fast because maybe it's around a turn and maybe there's boulders and rocks sticking up. So, it's splashing and they rate those. So, here we're getting close to a the shoots and that is a class 3.