His Presence on the Sixth Day

When you write an email to Friends@TheSLG.com, it comes to me first, and there are a number of things I can do with it.

If it is predatory, I ignore it.  About five a year get that treatment.  I am not much into ghosting.

If the email has no name in the email address or at the bottom, I slap back with a greeting, “Dear Nameless.”   I have no patience with that level of rudeness. If you want me to explain something, I will explain it to a person not to a disembodied problem.   About three dozen a year of those, most of whom do not write back, which proves my wisdom in not wasting time explaining something to them.

If it is technical, it usually goes directly to Denise.   She has a big old club and can engender sheer panic in any recalcitrant piece of technology, just by walking into the room with her three gallon cup of coffee and a glare.   There are fewer and fewer of those emails these days, as she has terrorized the IT world into nearly impeccable performance.

If it is a building-your-life question, I will usually respond (sometime within three weeks) with a question, because most of the time you write me about the fruit, and I am too lazy to kill a tree by picking the leaves off one at a time.   I like to go for the root, but I often have to dig it out of you with a series of emails.   Figure a few thousand of those a year.   I lost count.   Or maybe more than a few . . .

And occasionally – V.E.R.Y. occasionally – there is something immensely compelling about your email, and I write back offering a phone call that you did not ask for.

From time to time, people decline the phone call.   Too much bother to talk to me.   But most of the time, they are surprised that I considered them/their question significant enough to merit the personalized engagement of a phone call they did not ask for, or expect.

Consider that correlation between personal engagement and perceived value.

God spoke most of creation into existence.  Pretty techie, frankly.  He just made a sound and all the stars in all the galaxies just materialized into their precise orbits.  Impressive.  We can’t even map them all with telescopes, computers and a significant army of well-funded astronomers, and He created them with His sound.

Could He have created mankind with sound?  I suspect so.  On the sixth day He sounded all the animals – chipmunks to dinosaurs – into existence.  Then He sounded all of the bugs AND my beloved earthworms into existence.

The uneven distribution of earthworm species is one of the primary driving forces of uneven human development.  There are a mere 27 species of earthworms in the UK and a robust 182 species in North America which is why my ancestors ̶ the ones in Scotland with extremely good taste ̶ left Poverty Flats and came to the Land of Abundance.

But I digress.

God’s crafting of the first manikin with His hands, squeezing the earth like a potter does the clay, was probably not essential.

If He could sound the vast cosmos into existence, and sound all of the animal kingdom into existence, it would seem that He could most likely sound a single human into existence.

But He didn’t.

He got His hands dirty, crafting the first human into an extraordinary shape.  Neither Michelangelo nor Gold’s Gym required.

Why?

Because He wanted to.

Because of presence.

Scripture does not say where God was when He sounded creation into existence.  Heaven is one option.  Spoke from there, did quality control inspection from there, declared things good from there.

We don’t know, it just seems probable.

But there is no ambiguity about man.  Whether God formed him lying on the ground, or standing tall, the manikin became a living man when God was close enough to him to breathe the life of God into him.

Adam took a breath, opened his eyes, and registered His creator standing there, right in front of Him, ready to welcome Him to the vacant masterpiece.

What a first sight!!!!!!

Let’s explore the opposite.  We are a few years down the road.  Artificial intelligence is perfected and robots are able to save everyone so much time and money by doing things better, more efficiently.

A robot attends a birth, receives the baby into its metal hands, meanders down the hall for the preliminaries, and then deposits the newborn in the bassinet in the nursery without ever forcing the child to engage with messy humans – much less its own mother.

Or not.

Adam was not created by an impersonal force and then deposited into the beauty of the Garden, or into the companionship of a deliriously happy, bouncy puppy, or onto a mountaintop view of an epic sunrise, or into the gorgeously appointed bedroom of a palace fit for a son of God.

Nope.

He breathed in and BEGAN LIFE IN THE PRESENCE OF HIS CREATOR.

Simple.

Stunning.

What we are all trying to get back to.

The presence.

Not the trinkets.

Copyright by Arthur Burk
November 2022

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