Faith and Resurrection

I am by no means a Christian scholar, but it seems like the central claim underlying many varieties of Christian faith is as follows: There was once a dude named Jesus. He died and rose from the dead, so we should get pretty excited about him and his homies.

Given that the resurrection is one of the most significant moments in Christian theology, not to mention world history, I hope everyone will get appropriately excited about...

My van.

That's right folks, the stone has been lifted from the tomb! A few days ago, the time came to roll my van down the hill from Rossland to Trail (that's literal, not figurative - our towns are about 10km apart, and it's 600m downhill the whole way from Rossland to Trail), and I figured it wouldn't hurt to see if the old beast would fire up one last time. Which, to my surprise, it did.

In fact, it happily roared to life as if it had never broken down in Fernie, made it home and then pooped itself in an apparently permanent way in the carpark of the pub across the street from my house. To be sure it wasn't a fluke, I turned it off and on a bunch of times throughout the day. Lo and behold, it ran just fine. I decided to postpone the trip to the scrapyard, on the grounds that a functioning GMC Safari van is a wonderful thing to own, and that if it at least made it to one of the bigger towns nearby I'd have a better chance of finding a suitable replacement.

The next day, it looked like my hope had been premature. It didn't want to start, but after much poking and prodding it eventually came to life and has been running fine ever since. Of course, when I say running fine I mean it is unbelievably hard to steer, requires a one-legged leg press of substantial force to brake, shakes when it does brake, has a crack in the radiator, and doesn't necessarily have functioning windscreen wipers. But I was used to all of those things, and preference adaptation is a powerful force in my life.

I feel, however, that if the van has gone to the trouble of dying and then rising from the dead, the least I can do is place my faith in it. Untold jillions of folks have placed their faith in Jesus after his brief excursion into the afterlife, and it seems to have worked out reasonably well for them. Of course, my van was dead for more than three days, has not (yet) ascended body and soul into heaven, and it's also not a member of a divine trinity, so perhaps it's more akin to Lazarus than Jesus. But that's good enough for me. I have a vehicle, where before I had none.

So, I will believe in the van, and drive it to Revelstoke on Sunday. That will mark the end of my time in Rossland, and the beginning of the next phase of my Canadian excursion. I'll be poaching internet as I go, so I'm sure I'll get a few posts up here (in fact, I wrote much more during my time in NZ, where the internet is still transmitted along a taut string streched between tin cans). I will however, be living on the road, which tends to make my life (and my posts) strange and incoherent. Wish me luck.