I recently read the story of Cole Thompson and “The Melting Giants.” I somehow touched me to look at his photos of these lone icebergs. Cole is a uniquely unqualified photographer. He has never taken a photography class or a workshop. He doesn’t have a degree in art, and he’s never worked as a photographer or had a gallery representation. He says he only has three lenses and none of them are primes. He doesn’t have any qualifications, except Just one… his images. And to him, nothing else matters.
His project “The Melting Giants” came about by happenstance. He overheard two men talking about the icebergs that come along the Newfoundland coast. That was enough, so he went to see. He had absolutely no idea what he would find, other than he wanted to take some pictures of some icebergs.
In Newfoundland, it was a record year for icebergs. But what Cole Thompson saw saddened strangely him. These magnificent icebergs, like frozen creatures, live a very short life. They are birthed from an ancient ice self in Greenland, and spend a year wandering the seas until they come along the coast of Newfoundland. There they break into smaller pieces, run aground, rock around in the surf, and melt into pieces on the shore, eventually basically becoming a bunch of 30,000-year-old ice cubes.
Thompson found this to be such a sad story that he envisioned dark images with extremely bright icebergs. This is in contrast to how icebergs are typically photographed – in color with deep rich blues. The images he took speak for themselves.
Thompson goes on to say “I got to know the icebergs as if they were individuals. They constantly changed as they melted and split into smaller pieces. Sometimes I’d follow a particular iceberg and watch it change over a period of days, sadly watching it melt away.”
The Christian life can be likened to the journey of large icebergs originating from ancient ice. Just as these icebergs have endured for thousands of years within the stability of the ice shelf, when Christians “break-off” from the worldly selfish system of living life, they sometime feel alone and isolated. But Christians can find strength and purpose in their faith as they navigate life’s trials, they are never truly alone. The water they are actually floating in, is the “stuff” that is at once both their slow death and also changing them into another form that makes them part of the God and creator of all. However, when icebergs break free, much like individuals facing their trials, they embark on a transformative and sometimes perilous journey. There are sometimes waves and storms, rocks and reefs.
After breaking off, I would liken that the icebergs symbolize the resilience of faith, as they may survive for only a year before succumbing to the warmth of life’s challenges, paralleling the Christian’s endurance in the face of adversity. I just had a birthday, and our human bodies much like the icebergs, do sort of “melt down.” Eventually, like the icebergs crashing into rocky coasts, Christians too will someday face the inevitable end of their earthly journey. Yet, just as icebergs leave their mark on the coastline, the Christian life can leave a lasting impact through their faith, love, and deeds, even in the midst of life’s trials and the eventual passing of time. I truly believe that somehow God will reconstitute all of the molecules and pieces of what made up that iceberg into something new, and incomprehensibly better as well as eternal.
Oh, and the ice that stays part of the ice shelf? It may seem to be there a long time, however, actually, more of that ice is lost by vaporizing every year than is lost by breaking off of the shelf. That ice, disperses into invisible vapor straight from the shelf. Somehow that end seems so imperceptible; silent, and invisible to anything around it, no beauty, no impact no drama…a dead existence that moves silently to a vapor hell of nothing.
I’ll take the beauty and danger of the iceberg life.
1 See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him.
2 Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.
3 And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure. (1 John 3:1, ESV)
