I was walking, actually, stumbling upstream. A kayak followed obediently at the end of a rope. The water was flowing too swiftly to paddle, so I was thigh deep in the cold water, attempting to avoid the roots, sticks, and branches. Spider webs tickled my face in irritating regularity. I scrutinized the water for snakes, bugs, and other creepy crawly things. I was in a fast-running channel to the side of the river. A beautiful canopy of trees defined the space. Sunlight streamed through the branches like a hundred shafts of light. They lit up the stream bed.
I was wearing open-toed sandals. I worried I might cut my feet on something metal or sharp hiding below the surface. The water was crystal clear. I scanned it carefully before moving my toes into danger. I was making good progress when I came to a rusting pile of metal. It was an old flat-bottomed boat. It was no longer much of a vessel, just a rusty skeleton that reeked of tetanus. I gave it a wide berth.
Not long after that, I stepped into deeper water. At the bottom of the river, I saw green and gold. I knew instantly from the shape that it was a phone. I braced myself for the cold and then stretched out my fingers toward the bottom, barely keeping my mouth above the surface. It was in bad shape. The screen was delaminated. The case was brittle and crumbling. Algae and moss clung to the carcass.
I put it in my kayak. "How it had gotten into this river?" I asked myself. I could see a struggle and an overturned inner tube and the phone fluttering to the bottom. There must have been pictures on the phone. It was supposed to be a LifeProof case. I thought I might be able to recover the photos and find a clue to reunite them with the owner. It would be fun to delight someone in this way.
Eventually, the phone was on shore. It gave up a SIM card like an oyster giving up a pearl. I was never able to recover anything from it. My fantasy crashed on the rocks of that river. I tossed the whole mess into the trash. There was no resurrection.
On Easter morning, the dead, mutilated body of Jesus lay decaying in a tomb. Then in a miraculous moment, it was living and breathing. The wounds were scars and our world shifted. Before that moment, dead people stayed dead. After that moment, all people had a route to eternal life. The timeline was split. We stand on this side of the most momentous event in history, in the shining light of the resurrection.