One summer, I took several high school friends of mine to British Columbia for a week of sea kayaking through the Princess Louisa Inlet. A yachting magazine had recently ranked the area the most beautiful place in the world. Baby seals, bald eagles, salmon the size of your arm – it was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of trip. And we got to live it for seven days.

The night before we returned to base camp, one of the guys and I stayed up late on the rocks to talk about what following Jesus was going to...