Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Beginnings

We all have a beginning.
Sometimes, we have more than one.

This is a place for me to go and share where my footsteps are beginning to lead on the journey Home.  I stumble, I fall.  At times, I run and every now and then, I fly.

Right now, I'm swimming.  I've jumped into a opaque, deep pool of Living Water.  I've been floating for a long time.  Mostly, I've been afraid to do much more than this.  It's safer at the shallow end!  The Lord invited me to take a step, or stroke, to faith.  To head out into deeper water and be amazed.


An invitation from the Author.

Who begins our understanding of time and history with Bereishit, which means "in beginning of".  My Bible says "In the beginning."  But that's not quite a literal translation of the Hebrew.  Bereishit is really the word resheit and the prefix of beth, or the letter B, meaning "in".  So, at the beginning, there is no "the".  Just "in beginning of".

Strange.

If He wanted to, the Lord could have inspired the use of the word barishonah, which does mean "at the beginning" or "at first".  If He had used this word, we would be reading "At the beginning" or "At first, God created the heavens and the earth." instead, which makes a lot more sense to my Western mind than "In beginning of, God created the heavens and the earth."  My English teacher would be horrified.

Instead, He chose resheit.  It's a word that in no other place in the Bible doesn't not have a noun immediately following it to let us know exactly what it is that has begun.  The nouns give us context.  We know what is beginning.

Genesis 1:1 though, is missing its noun.  "In beginning of ____________, God created the heavens and the earth."  We're given an emptiness, a hole, a fill in the blank so to speak.  Jewish commentator, Rashi, brings up that if Genesis 1:1 is about the start of the arrangement or progression of creation, then it should say "of the Lord God's creation of' as is found in Genesis 2:4's 'when the Lord God made the earth and the heavens'."

Could it be that in choosing to inspire the Word to be written in this way, with no "the" at the beginning, the Lord is trying to tell us that something unique--so totally different is happening alongside His fashioning creation?  Do I dare take this fill in the blank as an invitation to swim to a deeper part of the pool?

Could that noun that should follow "in beginning of" be the word decision or desire?  Because it is here, in this grammatical emptiness and infinite eternity, that a complex choice was made by the Lord.  To increase His relationships--which encompasses and unfolds at the same time--to create.  Things and beings outside of Himself, in relationship to and fellowship with Him.

It is quite literally, when Time and existence apart from the Lord began.

And that, of course, is only one of my beginnings.