In the beginning there was dust:\u00a0 an ocean of it.\u00a0 The dust lacked form, lacked life.\u00a0 This grieved God, who then cried amidst the dust until there was mud below, and mud above: a wobbling firmament of mud.\u00a0 God brooded over that mud, breathed over it, and then mud became man.<\/p>\n
Some time passed.\u00a0 Men-from-mud began to misbehave.\u00a0 Egregiously.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Feeling the pain of his hands\u2019 work, God grieved.\u00a0 \u00a0It was a larger grief than that first one, the one that poured form into dust.\u00a0 This grief was shaped by the recollection of specific evils, harm that his creation had worked upon each other and the terrible knowledge that it would continue.\u00a0 This grief was not of the nutritive sort.\u00a0 And God knew it.\u00a0 God cried for his creation that would not be able to withstand his sorrow.\u00a0 The lives that those lives might have engendered, if given more time\u2014he lamented for them, too.\u00a0 He cried because sorrow was so often a lop-sided engagement:\u00a0 people rarely grieve together for the same reasons at the same time and with the exact same measure of sorrow.\u00a0 Sorrow is unique, and therefore, misunderstood.<\/p>\n
Which is why God had sent a series of preemptive rescues:\u00a0 flotation device experts offering in-home inspections at absolutely no charge to all who said\u00a0yes.\u00a0\u00a0<\/i>Samples large and small:\u00a0 butterfly wings, life jackets, neon colored foam noodles.\u00a0 Then came the flotilla of canoes, life rafts, inflatable porpoises and plastic crocodiles\u2014also free.<\/p>\n
But it had been hotter than blazes, the heat searing the color out of grass, wood, air.\u00a0 The heat turned streets to rivers of tar.\u00a0 It had been so hot, that no one could take seriously these gifts of air corralled in tensile materials approved for water sports and nautical adventures everywhere.\u00a0 These offerings seemed like jokes in poor taste:\u00a0 especially the admonition\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0repent!<\/i>\u00a0\u00a0How insulting\u2014the implication that a sudden climactic change might have anything, anything at all do to with them.\u00a0 This is what provoked homeowners and renters young and old to draw their blinds, bolt their doors, roll plugs of cotton into their ears.<\/p>\n
At the sound of such unified refusal, such willed rejection, God\u2019s sorrow increased exponentially. Neither casements of sky nor wellsprings of deep could contain it.\u00a0 From above and below water rose and fell.\u00a0 God, as he had in the beginning, hovered and brooded over the dark and roiling waters.\u00a0 Days passed. Near Day 27 God brooded his way toward regret.\u00a0 The floodwaters receded.\u00a0 On Day 33 God remembered something\u2014another incidence of human harm done purely for recreational purposes, and then he felt sorrow.\u00a0 The floodwaters rose.\u00a0 That\u2019s how Godly sorrow works:\u00a0 it ebbs and flows.\u00a0 It\u2019s like the breath of the breath of life.\u00a0 There.\u00a0 And then, at times, less there.\u00a0 It\u2019s enough to fool the uninitiated.<\/p>\n
Which is the reason for the rainbow:\u00a0 a reminder for those who would doubt the potency of sorrow.\u00a0 A promise that should God become grieved in the heart at some later date, he\u2019d not resort to tears.\u00a0 Other reminders:\u00a0 in low places, flats and sinks, places like Uzbekistan or, say, Oklahoma, God\u2019s tears dried to salt.\u00a0 Thirst.\u00a0 Dust.\u00a0 From time to time people dig in such places and find evidence of life before the big sorrow:\u00a0 elongated fishes and fronds of plants stretched by the pressure of so much water.\u00a0 They hold these\u00a0 \u00a0items in their hands, speak of them with wonder and awe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the beginning there was dust:\u00a0 an ocean of it.\u00a0 The dust lacked form, lacked life.\u00a0 This grieved God, who then cried amidst the dust until there was mud below, and mud above: a wobbling firmament of mud.\u00a0 God brooded … Continue reading