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It was a great day to be alive. I was 19 and bursting with energy. The hot summer sun was shining through the trees of the upper Chilliwack River valley, and we were relaxing beside the river when we spotted an orange life jacket bouncing through the rapids. There was no one in it, and we quickly concluded that it had fallen into the river accidentally, upstream. But why just let it go?
I jumped to my feet and pushed waist deep into the current, my new climbing boots finding footholds among the smooth river-bottom rocks. I was almost there, but to grab that life jacket meant a last lunge. I missed it, and I felt the current lift my feet off the rocks as I slid sideways under the water. I lifted my feet up, bounced down with the current and waved to my friends on the shore before setting my feet back against the river bottom. But regaining the bottom proved more difficult than I had thought. The river was narrowing and gaining speed, taking me into the canyon where caves lay hidden. To make matters worse, the currents were now turning the water into white froth, and I sank unexpectedly, breathing in a chilling draught of water.
Suddenly life became very clear. The current had my floundering body firmly in its grip. I was not making any progress towards the shore. I knew there was no one downstream to help me. The river would wind through 20 kilometres of wilderness before it crossed the road again. With my lungs full of water, the time I had left was very short indeed. My body would no doubt soon be lodged under one of the log-jams that inhabited nearly every sharp river bend.
I don’t know how close to death I actually was, but I remember those thoughts as if it were yesterday. I looked up and saw the shafts of sunlight coming down through the trees and imagined myself rising up to meet them. This was it! My life was about to end. I saw my parents’ faces torn by shock and grief, and a girlfriend’s sentimental ambivalence.
And I thought about God. It had been some time since I had taken the road that led away from God. I knew the story that Jesus had told in the Bible about a son who had selfishly run away from home to squander his father’s wealth in wild living, wasting everything in pursuit of his own pleasure (Luke 15:11-20). I also knew that, according to that story, no matter what I had done, God was waiting as a loving Father to welcome me back home. I knew He was waiting for me even as I watched that sunlight shining through the trees. Everything I had been taught had prepared me for this moment. This was the chance for me to reach out to that waiting Father. It was as simple as turning my face back to God.
But I didn’t. In that split second, I did something that has haunted me ever since. Standing at the threshold between life and death, knowing that my heart was unprepared to meet God, who is a loving Father but also the Judge of all humanity, I made the same choice I had made much earlier. I said “No!” to God.
I did not die that day. Instead of being drawn down under a deadfall like most river debris, I was tossed out of the water and snagged by a partially exposed rock in the middle of the river at the edge of a small waterfall. Half an hour later, my friends found their way down to me and managed to drag me back to shore. It was several years before I turned my face back to the Father.
Once I had the courage to look back on my time in the river, a profound realization struck me – if we want to make our peace with God, we had better not wait for a crisis to do so. The crisis will have its own agenda, and, no matter how insane it sounds, people can and will defy their Creator even as they approach His judgement. If my experience is typical, then the ultimate decisions we make facing death are essentially the same ones we are making in daily life. People can and do spurn God when facing eternity just as they do in each new day as it dawns before them.
I was not ready to face eternity when that day began, and, even though I was given the opportunity to become ready, when darkness fell, I was still unprepared.
That day on the river was my Sept. 11. On that day, I was one of those who, against the odds, are spared while others, no better and no worse, are taken.
For all the terror of the moment, my life did not change that day. It soon went back to the pursuit of the good life. Oh, I was now a survivor, knew about mortality and had the occasional nightmare, but soon the next party or youthful adventure was all that occupied my mind.
It was not until I was years older that I realized the opportunity that I had missed. What I had missed was not just a momentary choice made while sliding into semi-consciousness. It was the opportunity to really answer the question, “Am I ready to face eternity?”
The shock of the crisis was powerful, but not powerful enough to make me honestly examine the course I was on. The shock of the crisis stopped me for a moment, but I did not use that moment for the purpose for which it was designed. I did not respond to the voice of the Creator calling to His wandering child. I was tossed from that experience as unprepared as I was when I plunged into the river reaching out for a piece of flotsam.
Many years later, a phrase in that mysteriously complex book, the Christian Bible, has come alive in my life: “Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts” (Hebrews 4:7).
James Toews is now senior pastor of Neighbourhood Church in Nanaimo, B.C.
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