Creation Distractions

In the beginning...

Thus begins the Old Testament. There were no eyewitnesses to creation, no author who committed the event to writing as a reporter would write his story for the evening news. What we have in the opening lines of Genesis is the spiritual reflection of a believing people whose lives were wrapped in an intimate relationship with a God who called this people his own. They sought to understand both their history and their experience in light of that relationship.

The remarkable thing about a spiritual reflection on the beginnings isn't that a created realm unfolded. It is that there was a beginning void of anything that would distract from the Creator himself. Today our hunger to find, know and understand God reflects on discovering how God's hands have intimately touched everything both in and about us. We see God stooping over the earth and with his hands continuously fashioning a world and moving us about on it as a young child might build roads in the dirt on which he propels his diecast cars on imagined journeys.

But God isn't the created world or the drama that plays out upon it each day. These in fact have become distractions that prevent us from drawing intimately into the presence of God, from resting and renewing ourselves in the very presence of the holy. The search for God must take us away from the things of life, the stuff of our existence, and direct us instead back to the beginning into the void and emptiness where God is God.

Copyright 2006 Don Neale, Jr.
All rights reserved.