Almost everything has a beginning.
The school year. Football season. Autumn, thank goodness, which just showed up after a summer hotter than a snake’s butt in a wagon rut.
Not that things will cool down in north Louisiana any time soon. But at least autumn’s out of the blocks. It’s started. It has had its beginning.
Just as everything does.
Except God.
Interesting concept, God always being around, never starting, never ending. Unlike the seasons and storms of life, he doesn’t go in cycles. He just is, was, and always will be.
But the rest of us, the “created,” had to start somewhere. Whether we’re a person, place, or thing, we were nothing — and then we were suddenly something.
History was not, and then it was. Fiction or fact, song or story, pet or person, everything but God was born.
And he’s always known what was going to happen with the rest of us.
Take the story of Joshua. Old Testament guy. His story started when his dad, Nun, “the Nunster,” as he was called by the boys, met Joshua’s mom. (Long story.)
Joshua grew into quite the stud. There came a day when he ordered his officers to tell the Israelites to pack up, that it was time to move out, cross the Jordan, and “take possession of the land the Lord your God is giving you for your own.”
This was a group of people who, under Coach Moses, had just played road games for 40 years. And here they were, about to enter the stadium they’d been promised generations ago.
The point here is that there was a time when the Israelites stood on the banks of the Jordan and, at God’s timely command, were finally able to cross over. An actual moment in time.
The entire book reads as the rest of biblical Hebrew history does, as an account of what a real God was doing with real people in real time. And although this marks the beginning of this era — the Israelites inhabit the Promised Land — the story had begun long ago, first with Adam, and Abraham, and Moses, and so many others we don’t know.
But God knew them all.
We are all part of the story, one that, if we pay attention, reveals still today the ways of God with us, people in the modern world. No good you do — a card to a friend, a cake to someone ill, and encouraging word — goes unnoticed or without eternal consequence of some sort. God, (as either Francis Schaeffer or Eugene Peterson has suggested, I can’t remember which?), meets us in the ordinary and extraordinary occurrences that make up the stuff of our daily lives. He did with the Hebrews; he does with us.
We are because he always was.
Every day he offers a new beginning, another part of His story — and yours and mine. If you feel alone or confused or even lost, it might put a spring in your step to remember that God’s great purposes are worked out “in the messes, storms and sins, blue skies, daily work and dreams of our common lives.” Our author is one who works with us as we are now and not as we should be.
As God told Joshua, who ably passed it along to his friends and family, “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.”
And all of the time, right from the start.
Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu