Dancing For God

Job 28:28

PART I

WHEN THE DEVIL COMES CALLING

When the Devil comes calling don’t answer the door

He’ll offer you wine and roses and more

The roses smell sweet but the wine is his bait

He’ll pour you a glass then just sit and wait

His suit is well cut and his shoes how they shine

He flashes his smile and says have some more wine

He’s so polite he even pours the drink

Then he pours you another before you can think

You look around and say where is that rose

It’s beside the bottle he says as he goes

Why don’t you have that last little taste

It would be a shame if it just went to waste

You reach for the bottle and say thank you I will

Then you reach for the rose but it won’t sit still

You touch the prize but it falls to the floor

And the Devil just laughs as he closes the door

CHAPTER 1

THERE WAS A BANG ... AND IT WAS A BIG ONE

It is dark, calm, still. Suddenly there is a loud noise, BANG! And a scream of pain follows. Ooh! Ouch! Ooh! Ooh! That hurt! Dagnab it! He has stubbed His toe. I cannot see a thing! He bellows. Let there be light! And there was light. And the light was separated from the darkness.

When everything was lit so God could see, God was not happy with what He saw. This place is a mess, he said. I am always tripping or banging my knee into something and I cannot find what I need when I want it. I have to organize this mess. I will put like things together and keep unlike things apart. I will build a series of domes. And He called the domes sky.

God was pleased with His new domes, all except one. That mess over there, He said, it needs something. I will add water and reshape it. So God rolled it into a ball. But it was too wet and sticky so He separated most of the water from the solid matter. There, that looks okay, He said. But it still needs something. It is still kind of ugly. I will give it plants, green plants, and colorful flowers, and trees that bear fruit. And once He had covered the ball with plants and flowers and trees, He was pleased. That is much more appealing, He said. And He called His new ball Earth.

But God was worried that if it stayed light all the time some of the colors would fade and it would become too hot. I will make it be light on the earth sometimes and dark sometimes. I will place a bright ball of light nearby. The earth will circle this ball and rotate so the earth is light sometimes and dark sometimes. He called this ball Sun. But so it is never completely dark, I will put a lesser ball nearby to reflect the light of the sun on the side of the earth where the sun is not. And He called the lesser ball Moon. And so I can keep track of all the domes in the sky when I am visiting the earth, I will put other balls of light in the sky that I can see when it is dark. That way, I will know that everything is exactly where I want it to be. And God called those far away balls of light the heavens.

And God did not want to be alone when he visited Earth, so He put living things in the water and on the land. And God was not alone anymore. But He was troubled. The living things were unruly and they tore everything up. They needed someone to keep track of them and make them behave. So God created a leader for all the creatures of the earth, someone to be their shepherd. I will make a man. And this man will be able to think and control all the creatures. And this man will have dominion over all the earth. And man will take care of the earth and all the creatures of the earth. And He called the man Adam.

But He knew there were times when He would not be with Adam. After all, He had other things to do, other places to be. But He did not want Adam to be lonely, so He created a companion for Adam. And He called Adam’s companion Eve, a woman.

God looked at all He had done and He was pleased. But He was also tired so He decided that He should rest.

Suddenly from out of nowhere came the sound of a loud buzzer. I was startled back to consciousness. I had been asleep and the sound of my alarm woke me up. I have to use the annoying buzzer to wake me because the music option does not work. Soothing music just makes me want to sleep more. I rarely hear the buzzer though because I wake up just before it goes off every day.  I think it is because I do not want to hear the darn thing. Man! It is annoying. And this morning, like all other mornings when the buzzer actually did wake me up, I fumbled around in the dark and found the button to turn it off.

Then I remembered God and my dream. I smiled as I thought about God stubbing His toe. I quickly shifted myself over to the other side of the bed in case God had already dispatched the bolt of lightning to strike me down for making fun of Him, even if it was in my sleep. Maybe it would strike where I was when I made fun of God’s stumbling around rather than where I was after I moved. How everything came into being, I said to myself as I lay there in the dark with a smile on my face. So that is the real Big Bang is it? God stubbed His toe.

And there you have it. That is the story of creation. It all started because God stubbed his toe one day in the darkness. Hey! It could have happened that way. You do not know. You were not there. And neither was I. And neither was anyone else.

Some people think they know how everything got started. They can fairly accurately piece together what happened yesterday, and even the day before. They can figure out what happened a hundred years ago because the people who were there wrote down what went on. And before people could write, they told stories about what went on and handed those stories down from generation to generation. And because they can figure out what went on yesterday and the day before and even a hundred years ago, they think they can figure out what went on hundreds, millions, or billions of years ago even thought no one was there to tell the story and pass it on to the next generation.

The truth is we will never know with complete accuracy how we got here. We can experiment, extrapolate, postulate, and theorize all we want, but we will never know. When we explore new territory, we do not know what we will find. We cannot know because there are unknown variables there that we would never even imagine. That same truth applies to exploration of time and history. The further back we go in time, the more unknown variables there are that could throw our most intelligent guesses off track.

Let me use the example of an asteroid that is hurtling through space. Scientists can take facts like how big it is, how fast it is going and in what direction it seems to be headed and they believe they can figure out where it came from. But suppose that asteroid had been traveling through space for 30,000 years and 25,000 years ago, it collided with another asteroid, broke into smaller pieces and each smaller piece hurtled away in a completely different direction from the original larger asteroid. The asteroid we are tracking and calculating about today is one of those smaller pieces. All of our calculations about where it came from are wrong. Then imagine the original asteroid had numerous such collisions, perhaps dozens. What does that do to all the calculations about where it came from?

The same principle applies to all of the explanations about where we came from. The further back we go into unexplored time, the more chance there is that variables exist that cannot be accounted for. This means we can never be truly certain how we came into being. Does this mean we should not even try to explain where we came from? No. It means we should never be so arrogant as to believe we have the absolute answer. And that principle applies to every question we will ever ask, at least until we have our next dream.

CHAPTER 2

IT SAYS THIS HERE AND THAT THERE ... IS IT THIS OR IS IT THAT

One of the Ten Commandments in the Bible teaches that we should not kill. Then a few chapters later, the Bible tells us to stone to death anyone who commits adultery or commits a number of other described sins. In the book of Matthew, Jesus tells us not to judge others because the way we judge them is the way we will be judged. Yet many religious leaders advocate severe punishment for people who sin or break the law. 

In many ways I am just like you, doing the best I can to be the best I can be, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, but always trying. The truth is I have many more questions about what is right and what is wrong than I have answers. God knows the answers to those questions, and to the things that do not make sense to me. And I believe that once God realized I would not be able to make sense of things, God the spirit became Jesus, a man who could walk among us, live as we live, and explain many of the things we could not figure out.

But Jesus did not answer every question. Instead He taught us a new way to think so we could figure out the answers. Jesus shifted our focus from survival, obedience and punishment to love and forgiveness. Jesus did not answer all possible questions because we did not even know enough at the time to ask some of the questions that would become important as human history unfolded.  What would we have asked about euthanasia, stem cell research, or cloning for example? We did not even know these things were possible. Abortion and homosexuality may have existed, but certainly not as extensively as they exist today.

As a Christian, I look to the Bible for answers to ethical questions. But try as I might, I cannot find direct guidance on many of those issues. I once thought the answers are all in the Bible and I was just missing them when I read it. So I have consulted theologians, pastors, ministers, and priests who I thought could give me answers to how things ought to be. But they can rarely point to a Bible scripture that plainly explains something as simple as when life begins. Instead, they often point to several seemingly unrelated verses of scripture in the Bible and relate them in a way that supports their doctrine. For example, Jesus said I am the good shepherd (John 10:11). I am told He was claiming to be God since the 23rd Psalm says The Lord is my shepherd.

Sometimes I have turned to reference manuals and searched them for answers. Often there is no mention at all of these most pressing questions.

So here we are you and I, trying to figure things out together. What if our thinking is flawed and we are making fatal mistakes? What if we are condemning our souls to an eternity outside of paradise and away from the presence of God because we cannot figure out the answer to some very important questions? Questions such as: Does God exist? Was mankind created by God with a reason for existing and a purpose for living or did mankind evolve at random with no specific direction or purpose intended? When does life begin? Is abortion okay? Is homosexuality okay? Are we our neighbors’ keeper? In other words, do I have responsibilities to the people around me? If so, what are they? Does dominion over the earth mean possession, control, and consumption only or does it mean maintenance, protection, and preservation as well?

Perhaps the most important question of all is simple. Who decides what is morally and ethically right? Is right something that exists on a sliding scale with its definition depending on when or where you were born? If I am able to convince you that a particular action is right, does that make it is right no matter how it had previously been defined? For example, the unprovoked taking of another human life is universally viewed by society at large as wrong. But if I am able to convince society that it is okay for the strong to eliminate the weak, does that mean if I kill someone weaker than myself it has suddenly become okay?

Can you and I decide when life begins, or if abortion is okay, or if homosexuality is okay? Can you and I decide to ignore the needs of our neighbors? Can you and I decide to destroy the environment or even a specific part of the environment in a specific geographic area?

It is much easier not to ask these questions and ignore them than it is to ask them and then wrestle with my own conscience trying to figure out the answers. Because if I ask these questions, have I not created an obligation for myself to answer them? I asked myself these questions, and others like them, long ago and I have wrestled with them ever since. Sometimes I lie awake at night thinking about them. Sometimes I dream about them.

CHAPTER 3

I WAS JUST SITTING AT THE BUS STOP

I was sitting at a bus stop in Phoenix Arizona on a late summer day. There was not a cloud in the sky and the hot sun was directly overhead. It was 107 degrees. But it was a dry heat! Most people laugh at that statement, but there is some merit to it. You don’t sweat so much when the humidity is only 20 percent, even when it is 107 degrees. Actually, you probably do sweat, and probably even more than you would in places where it might only be 80 degrees. That’s probably why people say it is important to drink a lot of water. But when you do sweat, it evaporates quickly, so you are rarely ever sticky hot. You know what I mean by sticky hot. It’s when your clothes stick to your skin from the moisture of your sweat. I recently visited my hometown in West Virginia and the average temperature could not have been above 85 degrees. But even in the morning when I stepped out of the shower and dried myself off, my body would be moist with sweat again within a few minutes. Yuck! That’s sticky hot. And that rarely happens in Phoenix.

Anyway, back to the bus stop. It might not have been sticky, but it was hot. I could feel the heat on my skin. The bus stop was about half a mile south of downtown Phoenix in a semi-remote area, kind of a warehouse district. There was not much traffic and there was no one else around and it seemed like I had been waiting forever.

Suddenly, way off in the distance, beyond a hill called South Mountain I heard what sounded like thunder. It was quick, like the single beat of a drum,