The Breath of Life

...then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils THE BREATH OF LIFE, and the man became a living creature. Genesis 2:7

God formed man from the ground. Not with a shovel to make a pile of dirt but as a potter forms something of use. Trying to grasp the image of the all mighty God leaning over to work the dirt by hand. Everything else He spoke into being but man he shaped, molded, formed, created each detail. Then the intimate connection between God and man took place. God gave man the breath of life. He passed to us the actual spirit of God. He made us in His image and gave us His Spirit.

How can I not be moved by that? God is the very breath I breath. He is a close as the air that surrounds me. While I do not often think of my physical breathing, it becomes all I am able to think about when it is cut off. How long do I go without the breath of life? How can I not be moved by that?

In the beginning God created...

Recently started my fourth read through the Bible and I cannot get out of the first chapter of Genesis. The creation story provides so much to consider. So much said, so much left unsaid.

God speaks and from nothing an entire universe comes into existence. Was it six 24-hour days or six billion years called six days? Either way the power to create something from nothing leaves any comprehension or research of that creation limited to what the owner of that process wants to convey.

God ordered the universe.
Day, night, weeks, seasons, years - God built time.
Land, sea, sky - God built space and place.
Birds, fish, animals, plants, trees, us - God built life.

Big bang? What started the bang?
Evolution? What kicked off the first beat of life in the primordial ooze?

"In the beginning God created...". These five words set the foundation for the rest of the Bible and the rest of history. Those five words are the prerequisite to the everything else. If I have trouble comprehending something else in the Bible or something in life, consider those words in Genesis 1.

God's creation, God's plan, God's power, God's rule.

If only that were my starting point for the way I try to see everything.

It is all God's. It was nothing then God created. I was nothing then God created. Anything I 'have', God created. Anything I experience, God created. Just understanding it all is His creation, His plan, His power, His rule would make sense why I have so much trouble making those things mine.

IN THE BEGINNING GOD CREATED...

The Sea

“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea” - Antoine De Saint Exupery

How often do we as Christians wrap ourselves in the details of building the ship instead of casting the vision of the endless immensity of the sea? If God's endless immense love is not communicated then the acts of discipleship in ones life will never find their target. I blush at how often I have beat the drum of reading the Bible or finding your quite time or getting involved in service but spent too little time kendeling a desire to be like Christ.

What is it like for even a small moment in time when my heart is touched by God? Why does the creator of an entire universe allow me to draw near? Where does this amazing peace come from when everything seems to fall apart around me? What happens when my eyes open to see what God is really doing around me? What does it really feel like when God connects my heart with another heart to share their load?

That is what I need to find out how to say. Then reading the Bible, quite time, service, solitude, worship and prayer will be joyous simple tasks that build the ship to float along on God's endless sea.

Beyond the Sun

This week, I will start leading a group through a look at Tommy Nelson’s study of Ecclesiastes (A Life Well Lived: Living with a Perfect God in an Imperfect World). Always love this book of the Bible even though it seems so bleak. I guess it because we get a chance to share the wisdom of Solomon and who else has received God’s gift more abundantly. Solomon had more wisdom, wealth, influence, power and everything else then any of us will ever have and he comes to one conclusion over and over and over again…it is all meaningless. No matter what we do under the sun we end up right where we started, dust.

Life is a treadmill.

Get up, cup of coffee, breakfast, shower, brush teeth, drive to work, …, repeat, repeat, repeat. Even when we break up our routines with the special things like holidays or vacations, those are really just repeats done on a less frequent basis. No matter how much I cut my hair, do the laundry, trim the lawn or rake the leaves, I am relegated to repeat.

Ah, but maybe we live for the pleasures of life. Solomon walked through the world of pleasure on a truly epic scale. He blew the doors off with countless parties, a thousand women, grand building projects, multitude of servants, along with more gold and silver then he could count. Everything his mind could conceive - he did. He had the resources to do anything his heart desired. He undertook one of the world’s great experiments and actually tried it all. And yet his words still echo, meaningless.

The chase for more and more and more and more never reaches the conclusion we are after. The consuming focus on this momentary visit to this place called earth has never changed the results. Wise or fool, rich or poor, driven or lazy, all come to the same outcome. We die, our friends gather and remember us for an hour, grab a sandwich on the way back to the office then by the next morning everyone has returned to the treadmill. Our stuff is handed off to someone else and the wind blows through and it was as if we never existed. As Solomon found out, everything under the sun is meaningless.

So why do I love this depressing look at life? Because the wise Solomon did find an answer in his experiment. He shares with us an antidote other then a leap from the nearest tall building. He tells us simply - Enjoy!! Enjoy what God has given you. The simple things like eat, drink and work. These really are where the physical world actually makes sense. Then spend a moment and find God in these gifts. The answer is found when we look beyond ourselves, above the horizon and beyond the sun. John 10:10 says it best, Christ brings the difference between just the existing and the chasing of the meaningless, to how we were truly created to live. He removes the futility from the soul and brings about the purpose we are actually dying for. By removing love of creation and focusing it instead on the Creator, we quit settling for the temporary and reach for the eternal.

Go beyond the sun.