Thursday, June 10, 2010

Living Intentionally

Have you already noticed how quickly the summer is filling up and flying by? To some extent, when I name the things that have already scooched onto my calendar, it seems like I have already spent it, like it is over and I have missed out on all the summery things I hoped to do!


Of course, it is just beginning, so I cannot actually fast forward it...yet, at times it feels we are living in fast forward, at least in my little corner of the world. Our mind is so consumed with what is coming up that we often miss the hear and now. I am guiltiest of all; crown me Queen of Multitasking and Over-committing.


I've come to realize that all the multi-tasking I did as a young mother of four children has left me very little memory of various things in our day-to-day life. So sad! Just not a lot of recall when you store everything in your short-term memory (which is what you do when you multi-task). The things there don't last long...hence the name "short term."


Desiring to learn from the past, I am deciding to live more intentionally in the present, when I have the presence of mind to do so...ha, ha! As the various activities loom large, I am going to stop and water the flowers, picking a few along the way. As well as spending time with the kids that says, "I am dropping all this other stuff and paying attention to YOU because you matter to ME!"


With that, I leave you for now. We have a book to finish reading and here I am on the computer...

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At the Intersection of Creation and Evolution: A Dream

The alliterating story below is based on a dream I had several years ago. Please contact me for permission to reproduce.

Darkness devours me.

I am enveloped in emptiness.

Are my eyes open or are they closed? I strain against this shroud of night and still see nothing.

What is this place?

An image illuminates in front of me. A large, leafy tree streaks past and vanishes.

It deserts me to the darkness again.

In a moment, more images appear. A rapid succession of snapshots and thoughts clamor before my eyes and mingle in my mind.

I see seedlings. Several supple shoots have emerged before me and then swiftly stream away.

“The first trees on earth were not seedlings”, my mind observes. “They were not created as small insignificant saplings.”

That thought is rapidly replaced with a vision of a man.


He’s maybe 30; he is muscular and needs to shave.


He fades away.

In his place I see an infant.

A tiny bundle of pink skin upon a soft blanket flickers briefly in my brain.

“Man was created with age,” is the next statement I hear. “Adam did not begin his life as a baby, he began as a grown man.”

The voice seems like my own.


The thoughts do not.

Reeling before me now is a blur of rivers, forests, mountains and even layers of the earth. It is like a movie rushing rapidly before my retina.

The soundtrack of this epic is proclaiming a peculiarly plain concept:

“The earth was created with age. Creation and evolution are not in total opposition. There is a reason that science finds the earth to be quite old: it was made that way.”

Thoughts continue to tumble through my mind; pictures parade before me. I listen in amazement to what seems to be puzzlingly profound and yet rather apparent all at once.

“Adam was created as an adult. Trees and plants were made fully grown.”

I suddenly feel quite certain that, if I were to chop down some of the trees that had been spoken into existence, I would find a range of rings running through their trunks.

“The earth was brought to life with age built into it… just like Adam. He did not begin life as an infant. The earth came into being with what it would need to sustain the life that was created. It was old when it was young. The world was
made with maturity; it was also produced with purpose.”

These thoughts are thrilling. Why had I not seen this before? It seems so simple. Obtusely obvious. Had others not observed this correlation? If they had, why wasn’t it being candidly conveyed?

In the span of thirty seconds I have been ravaged by a radical revelation. I feel the weight of its worth resting on me; it is tantamount to tangible.

I am neither a theologian nor am I a scientist. I don’t claim that the ethics of evolution are completely compatible with the Bible’s account of creation. But certainly Science can come concurrent to creation and affirm our faith with facts.

Of course, the Omnipotent Originator of the Universe is exceedingly elusive to what our mind could ever envision. Above what science could ever extensively elucidate.

Accordingly, creation is confounding too. Each diverse discovery deems it more marvelous to grasp. Many scientists have reluctantly relented to the theory of Intelligent Design.

That’s why, alongside those facts, we also need faith.


Lying inexplicably at the intersection of those two essential elements is an exceptional endowment: the intermittent insight of our dreams.

Followers