A Living Being

A Living Being.  Living is more than doing or achieving, just like going is more than arriving at a destination or making good time. After all, making good time is rather disconnected from making time good. A lost art exists in off-ramping the super-highway of gettin’ stuff done, taking instead the inefficient backroads and wandering a while. In this way, prioritizing the essence of being over the efficiency at doing is one of the multiple ways that we bear the image of our Creator. “Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (Gen. 2:7). 

Among the most stupendous details about God’s creation is not so much that he accomplished a “very good” work in six short days (Gen. 1:31), but that he took six long days to do a work that might have taken a fraction of a nanosecond. God clearly moved intentionally slower than his ability allowed. Maximum speed evidently is not God’s highest value.

When God made the earth, he left it intentionally under-cultivated, idyllic but not perfected. Notably, God planted the garden after he formed the human (Gen. 2:8). In other words, God did not make a worker to manage his creation, he made a companion to join his work of cultivation—a living being who could and would reflect and represent God in the created order, a privilege which God unmistakably gifted to both male and female humans individually and in harmony together (Gen. 1:26-28).

This apparent slowness of God within the week of creation halts, or at least challenges the insatiable, modern demand for better, faster, stronger. God’s patience, therefore, explains Job’s misery, and not the other way around. God’s promise outlasts Abram and Sarai’s fortitude to wait twenty-five years for the son of promise. God’s goodness frames the forty years Moses tended sheep in the desert and Israel’s forty years as wandering “sheep” in the same desert. Joshua’s decades-long task of conquering the Promised Land, David’s nearly ten years on the lam, Elijah’s entire ministry without a single friend before God provided Elisha, Jeremiah’s fifty-year career with zero “fruit” (so called), and Paul’s many years “on the shelf” between preaching in Damascus and teaching in Antioch—these all demonstrate that God is never late, never early, never rushed, and never frustrated.