Guest Blogger - Bram H

Day 5 Dive Report

A day off!! In North Queensland!! Gotta love that. We got to feel like tourists for a day in Airlie Beach, with everyone finding their own flavour of fun. For Sparky and I, it was a 15 min boat ride to Daydream Island for some adventure.

I think Sparky got the adreniline award, trying his hand at Para-Sailing. I didn't hear him practising the Soprano part of the big finish to "Your Love Still Amazes Me" while he was up, so I guess he represented the testosterone-charged basses well.

For me, it was off to the dive shop to grab a wetsuit, some bottled air and local dive guide and then spend a couple of hours having fellowship with fish. I really cannot think of a better way of getting up-close and personal with God's creation than diving. Even though the visibility yesterday was down to 3 metres at times, with vicious currents, I still had the priveledge of directly interacting with thousands of living creatures that God imagined and brought in to being. I also got to reflect on how our free will often damages God's perfection. There seemed to be a lot of evidence of pollution with dull-coloured muck covering a lot of the area and more areas of dead coral than live coral, but this just made the patches of beautifull coral and spectacular fish stand out even more. With the poor visibility and swirling currents, I had to be very careful to keep my eyes on the dive guide, as I found when I came across a friendly coral trout who didn't mine being tick
led - the guide was out of my field of vision for less than 5 seconds, but when I looked up, he was gone, and could have been anywhere; after normal search procedures kicked in, we soon found each other again and continued on. On the second dive, a couple of newly certified divers joined us, so I got to ride shotgun and keep coralling them towards the dive guide who was just a shadow in the water 4 metres away.

It is so easy for me to spiritualise things I see when I am diving - I'll leave it to you to meditate on this glimpse into God's creation through my eyes and see what God says to you.

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