Several years earlier, I had been in a place in my spiritual journey where God seemed nonexistent. I was still carving out time to connect with God each day. Reading Scripture. Praying. Solitude.
Though I emptied my bag of spiritual discipline tricks, nothing seemed to change. I arrived at church empty and left unsatisfied. I read from Psalms. Proverbs. Obadiah. The Gospels. Even Leviticus. Nothing connected. Worship was meh. Conversations felt flat.
Where do I go, God? What do I do? All I heard was crushing silence, the kind that’s empty and full, quiet and deafening all at the same time.
Weeks rolled into months. Though discouraged, I refused to stop pursuing God. One morning, the thought struck me, “Maybe it’s time to go back to the beginning. Plodding through the first 50 chapters of the Bible.”
I began catching glimpses of the wonders of God I had never seen before – mysteries of creation, promises of redemption, the depths of God’s love for humankind. Like the first drops of blue ink spilled into a carafe of water, the beauty infused my mind and heart.
Finishing Genesis, I felt compelled to return to the beginning. I read and reread, weaving in commentaries from the likes of Walter Brueggemann, Bruce Waltke, and Nahum Sarna.
The more I explored Genesis, the more I felt I was on a morning hike, looking around to see a moss-carpeted forest, wholly present and fully captivated by the mystery and marvel of it all.
That morning became an 18-month-long, personal in-depth look at the book of the Bible whose name is drawn from the first word of Scripture, in Hebrew, beresheet, meaning, “in the beginning.”
Genesis, I discovered, is more than the story of our origins, where we began, the formation of our cosmos and humanity.
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