A Day in the Life

It’s December and the ice is beginning to build on our end of the lake. It usually gets to about a metre thick by the end of February, strong enough to drive a loaded logging truck on. Since Lac La Hache spends the better part of five months on ice, the locals who are stuck here for the winter have to figure out something to do with it. Ice fishing figures large in the winter itinerary. So does cross – country skiing and snowmobiling. Apparently, years ago some locals even used to ice sail.

The definitive Lac La Hache winter sport in years gone by was skate fishing. There is a story in the Spokane Daily Chronicle dated March 9, 1968 describing how the Lac La Hache locals would skate – fish for lake trout up to 25 pounds in size. Of course the ice had to be clear enough to see through and that is only an occasional phenomenon, making skate fishing a very special experience. In the article, Mrs. Buster Hamilton is quoted as saying: “They skate around the lake until they spot a big trout. When they locate one they keep skating between the fish and the deep water gradually scaring it into the shallow water. Finally, when the fish is tired out and rests on the bottom in about eight feet of water, they cut a hole in the ice and spear the fish.” The reporter, a cynic from south of the border, came off as a tad doubtful in the article. I’m a believer; I’ve seen the pictures. I’ve even tried to skate down a fish or two at our end of the lake, not for the fish mind you but for the exercise.

As I recall, it was early December about 20 years ago. Linda and I, our two teenage boys, Davin and Halden together with our infant daughter Chelsea, awoke to an early freeze. Overnight, the temperature had plummeted to far below freezing. Our shallow end of the lake must have frozen in an instant. I imagined it happening almost cartoon – like, perhaps to the sound of a single chime from a tinkle bell. The new winter ice was deep, strong and crystal clear. Oddly, the sky was lead grey, very low and heavy with ice fog.

The boys and I went down to the lake to test the ice and found it strong enough for skating. Soon that’s what we were all doing, except for Chelsea who was being spirited along on her old wooden sleigh. With the aid of the low, leaden sky reducing reflection to almost zero, the view through the ice was phenomenal. It was like skating on the surface of absolutely calm water. Everything was transparent and visible beneath our feet and it felt like everything above our heads was rock solid and impenetrable. And then the boys spotted several large fish. The race was on as each one tried to skate down a trout. In the end, everyone got lots of exercise, including the fish.

I will never forget that December morning. It was surreal, like it was a strange, new world where everything transparent and fluid was under my feet and everything dense and solid was over my head. It all seemed upside down. It felt like I should have been skating on my hands so that I could be in sync with the creation around me. Surreal days like this usually set my mind to contemplating a new creation.

As a Christian, particularly at this time of year, I am very conscious that my whole life is framed within the advents of Christ. The first was when he was born in a manger 2,000 years ago. He lived and loved and taught and eventually died on a cross ultimately to rise from the grave, revealing God and effecting God’s salvation for sinners the likes of me. Second is his daily coming into my life by the power of the Holy Spirit. He brings about renewal and regeneration in me, particularly as I have fellowship or communion with others and he powerfully fulfills his promise to be in the midst of those who gather or serve in his name (Matthew 18:20 and 25:40). Third is the complete new creation that God will institute when Christ comes in the end times. In my experience, this advent is not something that we Presbyterians like to think or talk about. Few of us even know what we believe when it comes to what theologians like to call eschatology. But it’s this third and final advent that surreal days like my December upside – down – world experience causes me to contemplate.

Whether we Presbyterians like to talk about it very much or not, it appears the Bible does. The New Testament insists that Christ is returning and a new creation will result. I don’t think it is putting it too strongly to say that the return of Christ and the new creation that will result is both the raison d’etre and conclusion of the New Testament. As John E. Alsup so aptly puts it: “Language regarding new creation and a new eschatological (promised end – time) existence dominates the fundamental orientation of all New Testament preaching and writing. The locus of this orientation is the resurrection of Jesus; the new creation has dawned with the dawn of Easter.”

The exciting thing is what has dawned with the resurrection of Jesus; the New Testament promises will be fulfilled with his final advent. There will be a bodily resurrection to new life for us and a physical new creation for us to live in (Revelation 21:1, 2 Peter 3:13). R. J. Bauckham writes: “With the final achievement of human salvation there will come also the liberation of the whole material creation from its share in the curse of sin (Romans 8:19–23). The Christian hope is not for redemption from the world, but for the redemption of the world.” That’s pretty heady stuff, at least for me. I like the way the Nina Simone spiritual puts it: “There’s a new world comin’ and it’s just around the bend.”

But what will it look like? What will it be like? Will it be an upside – down kingdom kind of thing or a renewed Garden of Eden? The Bible has all kinds of word pictures; everything from a wedding feast to paradise restored to a New Jerusalem. But these are just metaphorical. In the end, we have to do the Advent thing: live in hope and wait and see. As the apostle so aptly summarizes it: “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9).