Operation Arrowhead Ripper

In case you don’t know, our troops are involved in a major battle.  The Battle for Baqubah is going well.  Please read Michael Yon’s dispatch “Surrender or Die”: http://michaelyon-online.com/wp/surrender-or-die.htm

Support Michael’s mission by subscribing to his newsletter and contributing to his work.  He is not paid or supported by any of the news services.  Don’t trust the major news outlets to tell the truth about what is going on over there. Michael gets up close with the soldiers and presents the real picture.

Camping and Geocaching

I had a very humbling experience this last weekend. I’ll try to keep this short. Three families from our house church went on our 1st annual early summer campout. We camped at Canyon Point Campground which is at about 8000 ft. on the Mogollon Rim.  Very nice weather compared to Phoenix up there.

One of the things that John Rowden and I like to do when up there is geocaching. (If you don’t know about this, go to www.geocaching.com for information.) On Saturday we went on a couple of geocache searches. One of them took us deep into the forest near Willow Springs Lake. The whole idea of geocaching is to use a GPS device to locate the hidden cache using the coordinates for the cache from the geocaching website. When we parked my truck at the trailhead, I had the option of setting the coordinates for that location in the GPS so that we could return back. But I did not do that thinking that I could simply reverse the direction we were taking to the cache to return. Well, we found the cache and but returning back we went north of the lake, away from the parking location. After 3 hours and finally coming to the realization that we had gone past the lake some distance, a frustrated John (we had his daughter Toni with us) suggested that maybe we should pray before we changed our direction. We did. After a short distance we came on a road that led right to Willow Springs Lake.

From there we were able to walk to the trailhead parking lot. We were gone for a good 4 hours with most of that in a ‘lost’ state. For me, God gave me another lesson in trusting in Him. I always seem to be trying to do things on my own. But that almost never works out for the best. Only when I trust in my God and Savior, do things always work out for the best. (Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not rely on your own understanding; think about Him in all your ways, and He will guide you on the right paths. Prov 3:5-6)

And, oh yes, I also learned another valuable lesson. You ALWAYS set the return coordinates for the location where your truck is parked.