The great Creator who breathed galaxies into existence began the creation of our world by speaking into the swirling, formless void of nothingness, “Let it be!” Because He is light, His first “let it be” was “light.” And there was light. Then He separated the light from darkness and gave them both names: day and night.
Then He called the firm particles out from the misty wetness, drawing the firm together and separating what was solid from the liquid. He named the firm firmament and the liquid water—water below, vapor above and land in between. His first foundational work was done. There was light. There was night. There was earth, and there were seas. “Good work! Necessary work!” He breathed.
Photo by Angela Kellogg
Eons later, this great Creator would choose to plant Himself on this planet. He longed for His created work to know Him, especially the creation He had named man. But this would require an enormous risk of limitation. Life itself would have to distill itself into the smallest denomination of life of which this tiny planet was capable: a single cell. This cosmic singularity must become a single cell to combine with a human cell. This great God would become one of us in our most vulnerable form—a helpless baby.
The story of this Creator-God reaching all this unfathomable distance is a wonder that stretches credulity. Yet, it is simple enough on its surface for a child to understand and so profound that the most brilliant and most schooled of minds cannot truly comprehend. So all, the simple and the brilliant, must hold the mystery with an open hand like one holds for a moment a snowflake on an eyelash in the moonlight.
Photo by Angela Kellogg
How fitting that this human-encased God-essence, pure and true, walked in sandaled feet the sandy shores of a small sea—a place where firmament and water come together—telling the secrets of the mystery in earthy stories filled with metaphor, so that we who were made of the very earth He called forth could have inklings, now and again, of a truth beyond words and a Life that transcends the living out of our days.
This Holy child that was born in earth’s simplest of circumstances never got very far from a seashore where water and grains of firmament meet. There He taught with stories that explanations could never impart, so that we ourselves could transcend time and space, earth and water to recognize the essential kinship between eternity and this moment.
Click below to listen to the podcast “The Story You Never Heard” featuring Gloria Gaither.