In the beginning…

Beginnings are hard.  They frighten, intimidate, excite, beckon and threaten.  They seem often to create anxiety for and about.  As sequential, chronological creations, each moment seems a new beginning, and it’s only through the sheer number of such moments that we eventually grow numb to them individually, and begin to fixate upon specific moments in time as momentous enough to be called “beginnings”.  Perhaps part of our greatest anxiety is that beginnings connotate the unknown.  Most beginnings entail outcomes that are not necessarily known and predictable. 

Of course, our perceptions of beginnings and time and reality are skewed.  How could they not be?  We are broken, fragmented, shattered people living in a pipe-bombed carnival mirror-show.  Few things are as they seem to be, or as we interpret them to be in this world.  Yet we prod and dissect and insist that things are what we claim them to be.  Including beginnings.

“In the beginning…“

Not, ‘Once upon a time’.  Not ‘A long time ago’.  Not ‘A while back’. 

“In the beginning…”

There has only been one beginning.  There will be only one end.  We experience our world in bits and pieces rather than as a continuity.  We can’t imagine how the assertion of Genesis 1:1 could possibly mean what it says.  We insist that there are a myriad of beginnings and endings.  Our birth.  Our graduation.  Our marriage.  Our divorce.  Our death.  Starts and stops, beginnings and endings.

But Genesis asserts differently.  One beginning.  One single starting point, initiated by an eternal God for His eternal purposes.  We are nothing new.  My children are nothing new.  Their grandchildren will be nothing new.  All was known and part of the one beginning.  But each is only shown to me moment by moment.  While I was created for eternity, I was not created for infinity.  I am not God, and was not designed to experience the totality of His designs – only my part in them. 

I look forward to the day that I can look out over the vistas of eternity and begin to make some sense of it all.  Perhaps never complete sense – not in the way that God sees and senses it.  But certainly enough sense to appreciate the beauty and magnitude and scope of it all.  Enough to see it in continuity, and to finally understand the whys and hows of my life. 

Until then, I am stuck with the imaginings of beginnings and endings.  And so, I begin again.