The Zambezi River rolls across a vast plateau in southern Africa and falls into a deep cleft in the earth. This sudden descent is known as Victoria Falls.
Victoria Falls is twice as wide as Niagara, and twice as high. Though neither the widest nor the highest waterfall, when height and width are combined it is the largest sheet of falling water anywhere on the planet.
Your New Favorite Writer visited Africa a few years ago. On takeoff from the airport at Livingstone, Zambia, our pilot flew a slow S-curve at low altitude, so passengers on both sides of the plane could get a good gander at the falls.
It was an astonishing spectacle.
The trench into which the Zambezi tumbles is cross-wise to the river. It is so wide, so narrow, and so deep that the water seems to plunge straight into the bowels of the earth. There is an outflow stream at the bottom of the gorge, but it is narrow, dwarfed by the immense falls.
Wait For It
I have reached that point in life when old friends, whom I’ve known for ages, are dropping dead one by one. It concentrates the mind. One dwells on death.
Now here, on a different continent, an image presented itself: Picture all of us, all humanity, moving across a wide plain. And somewhere in that plain is a crevasse. But it can’t be seen from any distance.
Perhaps the crevasse is crooked, so you may reach your part of it it before or after I reach my part of it, even though we march abreast.
From my point of view, a friend or aquaintance suddenly drops out of view—yet here I am, still sauntering forward. Someday, without warning, it will be me—and people I know will keep strolling or marching along, wondering what became of me.
Now, Here’s the Payoff
Like the waters of the Zambezi, I may appear to have been swallowed whole. But actually, I will just flow out sideways, like everyone else, through new channels, into wide lakes, past twisty creeks and broad estuaries, to God’s eternal sea.
Christ is risen. Alleluia!
Happy Easter.
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
