Journey of Gratitude Episode 3

He did a loop on the first date. She married him anyway — and decades later, they built a chapel on the land they'd flown over that day without knowing it.

In Episode 3 of Journey of Gratitude, Tri Robinson explains the four-seasons metaphor at the heart of his book — spring's wild growth, summer's toil, fall's harvest, winter's reflection — and tells the full-circle story behind the book's cover.

What is Journey of Gratitude?

Hosted by Ruben Navarrete and author/pastor Tri Robinson, The Journey of Gratitude is a deep-dive conversation centered around Tri’s book, A Journey of Gratitude: Traversing Four Seasons of Life. Together, Ruben and Tri go beyond the pages of the book to explore the profound, sometimes messy, and always miraculous ways that God directs our paths. Part memoir and part spiritual retrospective, this podcast is a guide for anyone looking back at where they've been to better understand where God is leading them today.

Announcer: 00:19

Welcome to the Journey of Gratitude podcast hosted by Troy Robinson and Ruben Navarret.

Ruben: 00:29

So my question is, tell me a little bit about the metaphor that you use in this book about the seasons, because you, the topic is, or the title is A Journey of Gratitude Traversing the Four Seasons of Life. Mhmm. So tell me a little bit about that.

Tri: 00:44

You know, well, first of all, I didn't set out to divide the book into four seasons. That's something that kind of came along, it was kind of an epiphany as I started writing. I just defining those four seasons, as I wrote, became clear that they really were distinctive, you know, and then it made sense to me. And I look back now, I look at it, and I recognize, like, not everybody gets to live the complete human experience, you know, they don't make all four seasons, you know, for one reason or another. But some people are fortunate enough that they can and do, I have been, and I first of all realized, and I think the thing was I realized I was in a definite as I was writing the book I was in the winter season of my life, and I realized that.

Tri: 01:45

Like, this is like the last season, you know, in a way. Maybe. But I also realized that I could see the metaphor was so perfect. People talk about, Oh, this season or that season, but I realized there really are, in many ways in my mind, very clear definition of these four seasons. The first season's the spring, and spring is the time of rapid growth.

Tri: 02:15

It's a time where a seed is birthed, you know, and it gives life, and it grows, and it's kind of random. You can't at first you can't even like when you see young plants, it's hard to define what they're gonna look like when they grow up in a way, you know, you don't know what they're gonna actually become. They're just these green shoots in many cases, and so life sort of starts like that. It's just this random, fragile thing, but it grows, and in the spring it's just this kind of like undefined time, but rapid growth, and in my mind it's the time of like craziness and adventure and youthfulness and just discovery of the world, you know, and yourself, and so the spring is really, and I see that like the springtime of my life was wild and crazy. There's no question about it.

Tri: 03:13

You know, I start the book in my teens, late teens, but really the whole, you know, that's the end of the spring season, but it really is a time before your life is really defined, you know, in a lot of ways. You try to, it's a time of really discovering what you're gonna be, in a sense, when you reach this place of maturity, but not knowing, you know?

Ruben: 03:38

Right, until you go through the book, and you The book is divided, of course, by chapters, but then it's also got sections which are defined by the four seasons that we know of, And it does a really good job of kind of encapsulating those periods in your life that are usually maybe decades or a little bit more You than a know, it's a whole phase of life. And do you ever see, or is it something in hindsight that you recognize when those begin to change?

Tri: 04:11

Yeah, in hindsight you do. Sometimes you don't realize it when you're doing it, but looking back like, so spring turns to summer, right? Summer to me was the time, it was kind of a time of toil. It was a time of work. It was a time of, you know, watering and, you know, plowing and weeding, and, you know, and in the human experience it's kind of like that time where you're an adult, but still working on it, you know?

Tri: 04:49

And so it is a time of work. You're learning how, in my case, in many people's cases, it's a time to learn how to stay married, it's learn how to be responsible, have a job that's, you know, you can be a breadwinner, and it's, you know, at a time of raising kids. I mean, it's all work. You know

Ruben: 05:10

what I think is interesting about that is, you know, you come out of a time of spring, new growth, all that, as you kind of come through your teen years and maybe into your college years, then you become an adult, and then you're in this summer period of time. And one of the things that I've realized, and I'm really coming to the end of the summer in my life, pushing 60, I'm 58 now. No, you're definitely in the end of summer. Yeah, I'm definitely in the summer,

Tri: 05:35

No, but not in the end of it.

Ruben: 05:37

In the end of summer, yeah, exactly, I'm at the end of summer, but like in natural life, how summer goes so fast, Yeah. And before you realize it's over, I'm realizing, Wow, that went fast.

Tri: 05:47

Yeah. Well, it all goes fast actually, when you get the winter session. Yeah, I guess so. I think, like, you know, all of a sudden people are Everyone's got grass is drying around you, you know, and you're just one like, well, this is getting close. And you realize, they say life is like a roll of toilet paper, you know, the more you use the faster it goes.

Tri: 06:12

Yeah, that's really true. And that really is true when you get towards the end of this journey. But the fall is the time of productivity, that's where I see you, is it's a time of great productivity. It's like all the labor, all the work, all the gifting, all of the, you know, training, of the schooling, whatever it was, now it's all of a sudden being used to produce something that's producing new, you know,

Ruben: 06:40

fruit. Right, and you don't have the anxiety, the fear, or all the insecurities that we talked about in the spring of your life, they're just, they're gone. Yeah. Because you've learned how to navigate in a certain way, not that you have it perfect, by the time you kind of hit the fall season when you're kind of in the harvest, yeah, that's kind of where I'm at right now, you know, kind of entering into that. As my son, he's a senior in high school, that came later for me because he- Your family came later.

Ruben: 07:08

Yeah, think we had Evan when I was 40. So that really kind of stretched out the summer of my life, which has been nice. Because all of my friends who have young kids are all younger than me and it has kept me young and kept me having to be fit and all of that, but the question I have is after you went through that, did your, you might have had one motive when you started writing the book, and that, was there a transition, what were your motives for writing the book, and did they change over time?

Tri: 07:37

Yeah, yeah, it's funny, okay. Kind of the beginning of this project started with my kids one day coming up for a meal, I can't remember what, we're all sitting around the dining room table by the wood stove in the kitchen, the cook stove. We're all sitting there, and my old friend Pat Armstrong, who's a big character in the book, he transforms all four seasons of my life and influences all four seasons of my life, because he enters in the spring of my life, but he's still with me, you know, he's like, I talked 80 to him one, amazing guy, but

Ruben: 08:23

You're not that far behind now.

Tri: 08:24

He's an old guy, yeah. But he's an amazing person, see? And he and I had these crazy wild adventures, both flying adventures, but also mountaineering and backcountry experiences, and we just had all these stories to tell. And he's a great storyteller, you know, and he's got a lot of humor. And we're sitting around the table, and we start telling stories, and my kids are there, and we're laughing, and it's like, we're telling stories they hadn't heard before, you know?

Tri: 09:01

They're getting a little older, so we're allowed to tell them some stories we weren't telling them, Pat has been in their life their whole life, you know, he's been like an uncle to them their whole life, and showed up at various times. We've worked in the backcountry together, you know, and everything, and so one of my kids, I can't remember which one, said, Dad, you've got to write these stories down because we want our kids to know these stories, you know? Put that in my mind. So initially I was, it was kind of like the book was gonna be about my relationship with this guy, this just good friend, you know? Because, and it's a lot of humor.

Tri: 09:42

There's a lot of humor in it because there was a lot of craziness in it, you know, lots of near death experiences, too. And so, that's how it kind of started, you know. And that was my initial motive, but as I started writing I realized I was writing about my life, and what was important to me, and then my memories. And initially I had a lot of trouble with chronicling things in the right order, and so there was a lot of old friends in college and throughout my life that I would actually send manuscripts to pieces and say, Is this the way you remember it? Because I want this accurate.

Tri: 10:25

I don't want this just to be my fantasy. I want this to really be an accurate story of what really happened, because some of it was almost unbelievable. That's when I decided to put pictures in the book, because I wanted to document the stuff that actually did happen, you know, and so that's kind of how it started, but then I just realized that every season was unique in itself. What

Ruben: 10:57

do you hope people come away from the book with? What is your hope that because obviously you write a book and you publish it for a wider audience, and so aside from people learning about your story, what is it that you want them to walk away

Tri: 11:11

with? Yeah, it's what I call a memoir, but a memoir with a purpose. I want it to be enjoyable. I think it's an entertaining book in many ways, but I call it a memoir with a purpose because I think there is purpose in it. I want people, as they, as I use my life as an example, that they might reflect on their life and see where they are in it, you know, and see where they could go, and also see the miracle of life.

Tri: 11:40

Like in the book there's some major full circles where I realized at the time, initially, when certain things happened, I thought it was just, you know, I didn't think about it. But later in life I looked back and I go, that was not a coincidence. That connected to something later in my life that was very important, you know. And so, you know, like I was telling you earlier that I get overwhelmed sometimes because the title, A Journey of Gratitude, came late in the book when I realized the one thing I was feeling more than anything else was this deep sense of gratitude for the opportunity to live, to have life, to have an experience on this earth, to have people in my life that were so meaningful and important, you know, and rich, and the experiences of it, especially the experiences of the wilderness and things that I know that my grandkids aren't even gonna be able to probably experience. Like, as you know, Idaho has completely changed, but when I came, I came in the sixties, you know.

Tri: 12:51

I was a 17 year old kid, and the whole entire population of Idaho at that time was less than a million people. Was like 800 and some thousand people. Boise, which is this massive city now, is 40,000 people. I mean, the whole valley was just, you know, and so it was a raw, open, wild land, you know? And the hunting and fishing and mountain climbing and the flying and the wild horses and the, you know, just the beauty and the magnificence.

Tri: 13:22

I go, gosh, you know, I feel so incredibly blessed I got to see all that.

Ruben: 13:30

On the cover of the book it shows you and Nancy standing by your, the chapel that you built on your property here, but it also shows a picture of the plane, your J3 Cub, which we'll hear more about in this series. Why did you choose that for the cover?

Tri: 13:52

Well, because it was one of the full circles. Yeah, at the end of the spring of my life season, which is the section one of this book, I meet Nancy. She's 18, And, you I'll tell the story later, but I met her at a keg party. I went to Lowell, and I was flying up into my airplane, was throwing rolls of toilet paper, bombing this keg party on Lake which you couldn't do today, get But thrown in anyway, was just, I mean, that's kind of the wild crazy, you know, of all that, you know, but I land my plane, I fly, I drive out to Lake Lowell, and there's a bonfire, and all these college kids, and she's a freshman, I'm a senior, and I see her across the fire. And so, I know I, I knew right then.

Tri: 14:52

I was just, it was gonna be a really special person in my life, you know. And so I invited her to go flying with me the next day. Now, she just saw how I flew. Wow, yeah. So you gotta say, not too many girls ever I can't remember ever taking any other girl flying in college, which is amazing, because before I met her I don't think they had the guts to do it.

Tri: 15:19

Because they knew me, you But I took her out to the airport, old airstrip, it was actually a crop duster strip off just the edge of the Boise River. We flew out. It's funny too, I go up and I did a loop right off the bat,

Ruben: 15:37

and An upside down loop?

Tri: 15:39

Yeah. Yeah. Just like Wow. As soon as I get up to altitude, I So it's a first date? It's a first date.

Ruben: 15:45

A first date, and you take her out in your J three cub, and the first thing you do is a loop.

Tri: 15:49

Yeah. Which is really stupid. Which shows me another miracle that she actually didn't tell me to land the plane and let her out, but she, but anyway, we take off, right? I went and take her on this picnic, and I'd made this sandwich and stuff, and so we're flying east towards the wilderness, but in those days there's a place, just, it's about an hour and half from Boise, now it's a pretty developed place, but it was called Garden Valley and there was nothing there. It was just the river, but there was an airstrip

Ruben: 16:26

there. There was an airstrip there. Right on the river.

Tri: 16:28

So I flew into Garden Valley, it's a beautiful high valley, you know, landed and had this picnic on the river with her.

Ruben: 16:35

That airstrip is right on the river. I've I been did a wedding on that airstrip one day.

Tri: 16:39

Yeah, it's a beautiful place.

Ruben: 16:40

It is a beautiful airstrip.

Tri: 16:42

Well, in those days, I had no instruments in my plane, and so I would use landmarks all the time, you know, I'd just always pick out things, well there's a butte called Timber Butte, which happens to be this butte right here, and it sticks up, and you can see it from miles away, you know? And I used it always as a landmark when I was going from, you know, towards the wilderness area. And so I always flew right by there. And years later, so we flew right over this property right now that's now Timber Butte Ranch. That's our final resting place, I think.

Tri: 17:20

And years later, we're, you know Decades later. Yeah, because we were back in California, and we were doing all that, and other stories, a lot of different, you know, and then we come back to Idaho to plant the church here in Boise. And then we were in town, we had, well, we're planting the church, I have to be close by to go to the hospital in the night, and all the other things that a pastor has to do, and I couldn't be in the country, but as the church grew and I got multiple staff, I could, I was free, and Nancy, was actually her idea to move back to the country. And so she found an ad on a three by five card in an old, old hardware store just outside of Boise that advertised 80 acres up here.

Ruben: 18:13

This land that we're on

Tri: 18:14

right now? This land here. Raw land. 80 acres. Yeah, and they described it, you know, and she came to me and said, I wanna see this land, So you she calls this number and this guy, and he meets us in his pickup truck at a bridge on the Payette River about eight miles from here, and that's a pretty scary road coming up from there, you know.

Tri: 18:42

We meet him and we follow him up this road, real steep cliff on one side, you know, we're coming up here, and think she's not gonna go for this just because of the drive up the hill and thinking, what would this be like in winter to get here, you know? Anyway, we finally top out on the top of that, this canyon that we come out of, and we look to the north and there's this butte.

Ruben: 19:07

There's that butte, yep.

Tri: 19:08

And I'm going, Man, that looks so familiar to me. And then it dawns on me that's the same butte that I think the thing that hit me was on my first date with her, we flew right over this property, probably not very high, because I never flew very high in those days. And here we are, and on that very knob, you know, that overlooks the ranch, I build this chapel, and it's our intention, who knows what's gonna happen, but it's our intention that we'll be, you know, buried there, cremated, buried together on that knob, and so when I wrote the book, it just hit me at the end. What a full circle it is. That's right, it's almost the last paragraph of the book that makes sense of the cover.

Ruben: 20:03

Okay, so what do you think the meaning behind that is? What do you think God would be saying about the full circle?

Tri: 20:14

I think that there's, we all experience things that we might think as being happenstance,

Ruben: 20:21

accidents,

Tri: 20:23

coincidences, but I don't think so, you know. And I think we can look back over our life, especially if you've been had the privilege of living four seasons, you can look back and see the miracles, see how God was on your life, and you didn't even know it, directing you to a certain place, and I see that all through this book.

Ruben: 20:48

And these are like reminders along the way you Yeah, were on the right

Tri: 20:52

small things, but in a way huge things, because it just says, you know, God was always there. He always knew. He always knew. He knows the beginning and the end.

Ruben: 21:04

He knows the end from the beginning, yeah.

Tri: 21:06

And it's like, wow, he did, at least in my life, that's for sure. Yeah.

Ruben: 21:13

Well, thanks, man. It'll be exciting to get through the book and hear more. Thanks.