We’ve walked a few steps into the new year and the sparkle and promise of newness has me back at the beginning, pondering again those first days when God spoke the world into being. I watch as sea separates from blue sky and the first bright stars twinkle. I listen as the first warblers trill and turkeys gobble and cocks crow. The sweetness of the first rose mingles with the tang of new pine.
God turns from one mode of creation to another, from word-art to sculpture, as he stoops to shape the first adam, or earthling, from the adamah, the earth.
It’s a world full of surprises. What will come next? Where will it pop up? What means will God choose to bring it into being? Like a newly formed horse, wonder gallops close and I glimpse the marvel of the first words God spoke to his new human creatures: “Be fruitful and increase in number” (Gen 1:28). Never again would The Creator make a human being without the involvement of his creatures. The fingers that had formed the first man and woman had woven into their souls and bodies all that they needed for this honor. The Creator had made his creatures co-creators.
We stand a few steps into this new year, called, here too, to be co-creators with God. Not solitary creators, thank God. Adam and Eve were not left to figure out how to shape tiny toenails or cause the embryonic gut to rotate into its correct position, and we can release the burden of trying to cause in ourselves or in others what only God can create. But not passive observers either. Like the first humans, we are asked to choose—in all its challenge and simplicity—to open to love.
Wow, my firstborn Treasure! This is all so lovely and profound. I’ve thought before of the miracle of sharing with God and your father the honour of helping create you and your sister and brother. The uniqueness of each of you, all formed from the same gene pool, never ceases to amaze your Dad and me. But I’ve never before thought of it all in this way – the wonder of God’s first words to his new human creatures being the ongoing gift of ‘co-creatorship,’ nor of our part being at its most basic, in all its simplicity and challenge, to open to love.
Thanks, Mom. I’m so grateful you opened to love and shared in creating us!
I love how God surprises us as we “unwrap” the gift of the children we co-created with Him. My grand daughter Esther, whose parents are both dark haired and dark eyed, came to us blue-eyed and blonde, not unlike the child in Ireland my wife used to be.
Lovely!
Love it. I was just talking to an Egyptian friend at church this week who has his own business about the gift that creating, and imagination are. A gift from God! Those ideas are a little rare here as education is based on memorizing and many are scared to be creative. Thanks for the encouragement not to fear!