"Don't they know who I am? I've hydrated Einstein, washed Cleopatra and some of my best friends were turned into wine by Jesus himself!! Now I'm stuck here playing with children"
This blog post comes under several headings, random thoughts, amazing facts, I'm not an artist and what has this got to do with God?
My family and I have been to Disney in Florida twice now and each time we went on a ride at Epcot Disney, presented by Ellen Degeneres, about energy. During the very slow ride (the only sort I do) you learn about various ways of producing energy, about how our world's energy resources are running out and what our options are, in terms of renewable energy, to start preparing for the time, in the near future, when those resources run out. One of the facts that we were told during the ride really stuck with me. There is no 'new' water on earth than there was when the earth first existed, the water you use in your coffee, bath, toilet, at some point, likely went through the bladder of a dinosaur! Mind blowing! Hence the other day I found myself thinking about the water that my daughter and I were playing with in the garden, and I thought I wonder what the water drops that are coming out of our hosepipe have done in their existence? (see, random thoughts) Had those particular drops of water quenched the thirst of a dinosaur? Had they been in the bathtub with Socrates? Or perhaps were part of a glacier that is now melting?
Now I'm not one to tell people what to think, I only try and tell people what I'm thinking and perhaps what I think, no matter how random, might make sense to you too.
So this got me thinking about the creation story of Genesis, although there are other similar creation stories from around the world and in different cultures. One of the most common and the one that we find in Genesis is creation ex nihilo, creation from nothing. Similar ideas of creation our of nothing can be found in articles from ancient Egypt, the Quran, the Rig Veda (ancient Indian Sacred text), and in many African, Asian cultures just to name a few. The ultimate reason that any creation stories exist is that for almost as long as people have existed they have all had the same questions. Why do we exist? How did we come to exist? Why something rather than nothing?
Like many of these things I grew up with the stories of Genesis and for much of my life I believed them to be literally true, that God literally created the earth and all in it in 6 sections of 24 hours and then rested for the 7th section of a week. In that time God created, among other things, water.
Now that I am older and I have learned so much more about the world, the Sacred texts, the stories of other cultures I have come to understand God stories tell me as much about the people who wrote them as they tell me about God and therefore they endow a Sacred quality that I thought had been lost when I decided they were not literally true. I thought that the easiest thing to do was simply to discount them, because if they are not true then they cannot hold truth. Well off course I now know that this isn't right and I have learned that there is truth and Sacred understanding to be found in most everything if I choose to find it there. For me, thinking about those drops of water, I realised how difficult it is to comprehend millions and millions of years and how much easier it is to understand 7 days. Yet I found that I 'got' God more in that Ellen ride than in the creation story. In that ride I could see the enormity of the earth, the universe, the passage of millions of years, the responsibility we have if the earth is to support life for millions of years to come. In that, I understood how God fits into the constant process of creation and re-creation within our world.
Is there a point to all this? Probably several and feel free to continue thinking about it for yourself after the end of this post and find something completely different for you. Perhaps a simple message about looking after our world and it's finite resources. Or perhaps a challenge to look again at Sacred stories you know well alongside those you have not heard of and see how something Sacred has permeated other cultures and lives too. Maybe just a new piece of information about water, or a cartoon, not very well drawn, from a slightly random mind. Whatever it is you get from this isn't as important as what you do with it. Stay blessed whatever you day brings.
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