Creation

A Sunday school class room fully equipped with Bibles, coloring books and a flannel board was sacred space in the mind of a five-year old boy.

It was there that I learned about God’s creative enterprise…about the Creator God who spoke the universe into existence. 

The first book of the Bible begins with this God showing up out of nowhere with a booming voice (in my mind it had to be booming) forming the words, “Let there be light!”  And, sure enough, there on the first day of creation, “there was light,” (even before “there was” the sun, which came later in the week).  This God, this Creator God, who could say, “Let there be” and “there was,” filled my five-year old imagination with wonder.

The second chapter of Genesis tells the story about how the Creator God stooped down, scooped up some dirt and made a person.  I envisioned God, in childlike posture on his knees in the dirt, forming the dirt into the shape of a man, breathing life into the dirt sculpture until the man became a living, breathing being.

Whether speaking or breathing creation into existence, this Creator God is, in a word, Awesome! (The term is overused but here necessary because truly I was in awe.)       

Now, almost 50 years later, I’m still in awe of this God.  My mind and my imagination still overflow with the wonder of creation.  

But now I’m filled with awe not because there is a God who spoke our universe into existence in a very short period of time.  I personally find no conflict between the poetic version of the creation story in Genesis and the scientific account of the development of the universe.  In both I hear the voice of God bringing into existence ex nihilo (out of nothing), everything that exists.  

I imagine the slow, steady, patient whispering of God over the vast nothingness long before and long after the big bang.  (Don’t ask me to explain how “long before and long after” happened in the absence of what we know as “time.”)  I imagine the slow, steady, patient whispering of God's voice down through the eons forming mountains and valleys, deserts and oceans, a 14-billion-year building project.   

I can hear the sound of God's voice in the slow movement of glaciers, in the clash of continents.  Not the car wreck kind of high speed collision, but the marriage kind of collision; two mobile landmasses joining one another in wedded bliss and stubborn confrontation, forever reshaping the two separate lives into one.  Mountain ranges reaching thousands of feet into the sky were formed one slow centimeter at a time, year after year as the voice of God patiently spoke. 

I can hear the voice of God in the movement of wind and water.  The oldest mountains slowly being humbled as the water and wind bring them down to size until, like our own Blue Ridge mountains, we can see the wisdom in their wrinkled rock faces and snow topped heads.  It’s like the voice of God has not only shaped them externally, but also internally.  When I walk those mountain ranges, they seem to share some of that imparted wisdom with me.  Sometimes I listen.  Sometimes I don’t.

This slow, steady, patient, creative voice of God appeals to me at the age of 54 even more than the instantaneous creative voice of God captivated me at age five.

Maybe the reason is because I relate the creative work of God in my own life to the creative work of God in the universe.  I've discovered that very little happens instantaneously, including personal growth. 

What if our development as human beings, our spiritual formation, our discipleship as followers of Jesus Christ, happens as God, through Christ (the logos, The Word) slowly speaks our lives into existence? 

What if, as we yield to this voice, we slowly move toward becoming the people God dreamed of when creation began?  Truly it is a slow process.  Maybe another 14 billion years.  Maybe longer.   

Like creation’s slow gradual formation through the power of the whispering voice of the Creator God, our formation is slow, arduous, painful, at times cutting into our hard hearts the valleys that will become lush with the knowledge of God; pushing up from the continental clashes in our lives the mountain ranges that raise us to the heights higher than we ever dreamed of reaching so that we can see things we never saw before. 

For this ongoing process we call Creation, (in the cosmos of planets and stars or the cosmos of heart and mind) we have the Creator God to thank.