In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty...
When I was a child I did not like church. Up until I was nine I had little exposure to things ecclesiastic. My ancestral tradition had been Quaker, especially on my father's side, but my progenitors had gradually been disabused of their Friend standings since first arriving on these shores nearly 330 years ago.
I was sprinkled in the Grove Methodist Church that my great-great uncle had built, where my mother's family attended and my parents had been married, but between that time and several years latter when my father returned from the South Pacific after the war, I don't recall being inside a church.
For some reason I do not know, it was decided in mid-1950 that yours truly should become a good Christian child and attend Sunday School. Every Sunday morning I was scrubbed down and dressed up in my goin'-to-meetin' suit and send down Washington Avenue to the Downingtown Methodist Church. I faithfully earned my perfect attendance pins, but this hollow symbol was all I got out of the experience. My parents and grandparents didn't come to church. I remember they came once when I was in some kind of little church play playing a tree, but other than perhaps Easter they didn't come. I don't even think they went at Christmas. It begged the question, why did I have to go?
By the time I was 12 I could make enough of a fuss about it that they gave up forcing me out the door on Sunday. I became just another of many who claimed Christianity and practiced nothing.
I was lured back to the church as a young teen by the lure of a hamburger. A friend and classmate invited me to Methodist Youth Fellowship with the promise that after the meeting we would all go to Dick Thomas's Brick Oven Drive-in out along Route 30, which was country back then. I loved the food at the Brick Oven, more than I loved the Lord I am sad to admit, and I would endure anything to eat there, even go to church.
I went that time and I stayed in the group. It was fun and interesting, but I was in it for the fun and games, and food, not the message. And I thought I was so smart. I liked to ask what I though were tough questions. I was looking for the gotcha.
"If God created the universe, then where did God come from?"
There you go, Reverend. Get out of that one, huh. Oh, ain't I just so profound, like no one ever asked that one before.
But you remove God from it all and the mystery remains and everything in the end comes down to faith. If the Big Bang created the universe, where did the Big Bang come from? Where does nothing end and something begin? How could nothing become something? Don't dwell too long thinking about it or it will drive you crazy, because something from nothing is impossible and there being nothing without something is impossible and there being something without end is impossible.
Our being here is impossible. Yet, here we be. If you can believe in this impossibility, then why not believe in God? The Big Bang came out of some singularity and I accept that the singularity was God and in an instant of time he created the universe and remains in control of its destiny. It takes no great faith to understand the complexity of all we are and see his architecture, programming, art, skilled labor, design and intelligent. It takes more suspension of disbelief to ignore God's hand in this creation.
"For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities-his eternal power and divine nature-have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse." Rom 1:20
Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone-
while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy? Job 38:4-7
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