It’s morning in Africa and, as often, today started with reading and listening to Brahms while on the cross-trainer and enjoying the brightness of the day’s creation.
And here the creation is now Zack, our new Young Dog, plus four new rabbits from Sam and his significant other, plus Bilbo, The Cat’s Girlfriend, so named by the children, apparently without regard for gender, who is here at the house now just as much as The Cat.
The animals all have to be fed and tended to, of course, and held and listened to and scratched behind the ears.
And then there’s the wilder African life out the window – the mammoth birds and the rush of wind they cause over your head, the ground-hog-like creatures scurrying across the front lawn, the monkeys that run along the fencing.
It makes you wonder if God just got lonely one day and if this is why he made it all to begin with, especially you and me, to have that relationship, limited as it is, for now anyway.
But then you read that in the beginning, the Creator apparently talked to himself when he said, “Now we will make humans, and they will be like us.” We. Plural.
This is it, the word passed on for so many centuries, the notion that long before we came onto the scene Our Almighty Dad (he’s somehow Almighty Mom too), the one who made us, male and female, in his image, was already in community with, apparently, himself.
The children have, naturally, asked about this, this three-in-one business – what we have come to understand as Father, Son and Spirit. And we have offered clues to the extent we can, like how water can be ice and steam and liquid and it’s still all water and nobody questions the reality of it being the same but separate.
But maybe the bigger notion to wrap our heads around is why our Creator, however we define him, would bother making any of it to begin with.
Why, when, in fact, you’re not lonely in the slightest but rather self-sufficient? Why make it all especially when you know how far off the rails it will eventually run down here on this little ball in space?
Unless out of love?