making something from nothing...

In exactly 399 days, I will be 30.  How this happened, I do not know?!  In honor of this milestone birthday, though, I decided to make a list of 30 things I want to do before I’m 30.  Starting this blog was the first official item that I checked off the list. Another thing I’m excited to do is to read through the entire Bible. Now I love my beat up Bible that I’ve had for years… there’s something endearing and comforting about all the notes written in the margins, the incessant underlining, and the flakes of fake leather that chip off the cover when I pick it up and open it… but for this particular challenge I decided that I needed a new Bible, with clean, blank pages. My prayer in this task is for a spirit of newness to emerge from the not-so-new words.

I opted for ordering a key word study Bible that gives the original Hebrew and Greek for key words in the scriptures. I’ve found that there’s a richness and depth that emerges when you know the implications of the original language. All that to say… I just got my new Bible in the mail and I’m excited to start reading it.

Since I’m super ADD, I’ll probably jump all over the place, but I felt it fitting to at least begin in the beginning… with Genesis… “In the beginning God created…”  Five words in and I already see God’s goodness and greatness.  So the word for “created” is bara, which means "to call into existence without pre-existing materials"- literally speaking, it means to make something out of nothing! In Genesis 1 we get to see a grand demonstration of this as God creates the whole universe as we know it from vast nothingness. Incredible! My mind got to wandering... and wondering... what this creator aspect of God has to do with me though?

I love that our God is a God of potential... where we can only see what is, He sees what is to be. God spent three days forming the world and then the next three days filling it. All the while He had the finished product in his mind of what He was shaping, but He chose to work through a process rather than something instantaneous. I think that God is constantly in this process with our lives too, creating something beautiful out of darkness and void. He is a redeemer at the core, longing to bring beauty and purpose to where there is none. This word bara speaks hope to me. It calls me to trust in the process of what God is doing in and through me, trust that He has a plan for the areas of my life where I just see a void.  So I will wait... wait for his creation to take shape in my life... because I know it will.

May we all embrace hope for what could be... and cling to the Creator that has the ability to make it so...