Who is Man?

I am taking a personal evangelism class this week and we have to write a one page summary on a topic to share each day in class. I'll post each this week as I finish them. Below is a brief summary answering the question: Who is man? or What has gone wrong with the world?

            Before God spoke the first word to bring creation into existence, he had a special plan to fashion a being to bear his likeness and reflect his joy to one another. On the sixth day of creation he set that plan into motion with the creation of people. Up until that point he had created multitudes of stunning, beautiful, and extraordinary scenes and creatures: the sun, stars, and moon; great seas and continents; the largest land creatures and tiniest crawling bugs; exquisite flowering plants and thick, luscious forests. But the crowning glory of creation was people.

These people were made to live in harmony with God. The love and joy this Trinitarian God shared within himself was extended to humans. People would walk with God, knowing his perfect love. They would explore his creation seeing how every detail pointed to his powerful creativity. God made these people to live in loving relationships with one another reflecting the joyous relationship God had in himself. In the beginning God declared this garden-life to be very good. But it didn’t take long for everything to go terribly wrong.

Soon these people decided that they had the ability to find something better than God’s joy. They wanted to decide for themselves what would bring them the most happiness. They wanted to escape the oversight of their kind and generous Father and discover the world on their own terms, for their own purposes. The God who just spoke them into existence and gave them a perfectly happy home with abundant provision suddenly became a means to the purposes of someone far lesser. They wanted to make themselves god.

Clearly the world today is not what God created in that original glory. What happened? When people decided to subdue the world for their own purposes they committed cosmic treason and flipped the entire creation upside down. Work became a burden, not a blessing. Relationships became battle grounds, not sources of pleasure. Instead of having dominion over creation, creation’s power threatened the lives of people. Most severely, people attempted to subject their loving Father into a servant to fulfill their own desires.

Without the proper source of joy this upside-down creation began to deteriorate quickly. Pain and suffering result from broken relationships, enslaving addictions, and dysfunctioning bodies. Societies develop for the benefit of the privileged instead of the good of all. Creation is subjected for the selfish purposes of people instead of protected for all to witness the creative glory of God. Rather than calling out to God to deliver creation from our mishandling of our privileged position, we double down on our failure by constructing our own paths back to created glory; and we fashion gods who will affirm our efforts to make ourselves god.

It is a deceiving path that appears to get brighter the deeper we run into its darkness. How will we escape this destructive cycle?

The Peaceful Sound of Crashing Waves

I was laying in bed last night relaxing with my wife on the edge of falling asleep and my mind rushed back to the time when we were married on a beach in Maui. 

While our room was nothing spectacular (having no breathtaking ocean views), we would leave the window open all night long so we could hear the constant sound of the crashing waves as we drifted off to sleep in paradise.  What an incredible blessing it was to get to marry my beloved on a beach in Hawaii.  It was like there was nothing else in the world to worry about as we were lost in the week that we hoped would never end.  It was certainly one of the greatest experiences of our lives.

And now, almost eight years later, as I'm lying in my bed I am drifting off to sleep again by the peaceful sound of crashing waves.  This time, however, I'm still in Minnesota; a thousand miles from any ocean.  Now the sound is coming from the baby wave machine in my newborn daughter's bedroom that I can hear through her monitor. 

This moment seems more peaceful than that previous one, because this came after nearly six weeks of getting less than minimal sleep.  I felt a combination of jubilation and great peace.  And also a little confusion about whether or not I owe Gary Ezzo our firstborn because of the great peace his book has provided our family.  All three of our kids responded well to the methods in Babywise, sleeping through the night after nine or ten weeks. Our newest, Olivia, seems to have gotten a hang of it in five weeks!

In the chaos of having three small children, two within 11 months of one another, and the busyness of selling our home and preparing to move, God has blessed us with good sleep much sooner than expected.  And just last night, our newborn gave us a break from her routine "witching hour" and went to sleep at 8:00 pm allowing us to have the most amazing quiet time that we've had in quite a long time.

So hearing the sound of crashing waves this time around was much more rewarding than that first time only hundreds of feet from the shore.  This time it was the perfect rest given at just the right time after weeks of dwindling energy being drained off by a houseful of little ones.

I drifted off to sleep thanking God for those sounds of crashing waves which were much more satisfying than any beach in Hawaii.