Creation

Prayer begins with the inhale.  Before we are able to utter anything with our lips we must first draw through them the air that fills us, enabling not only our speech but also our life.  And we must remember that humanity did not take the first breath but that it was given to us.  God’s exhale became humanity’s first inhale, filling us not only with life, but the ability to participate in the creative power of breathing.  For it was God’s breath that uttered the world into existence, and God’s breath that filled humanity with life.

And so before we gather words to give to our God, we must first realize that this activity of prayer is itself a gift from God.  It is the very breath that God breathed into humanity that we in turn direct back to God.  Taking in and breathing out this breath of God is no trifling matter. “This is not an enterprise to be entered into lightly,” Eugene Peterson notes. “When we pray we are using words that bring us into proximity with words that break cedars, shake the wilderness, make the oaks whirl, and strip forests bare (Ps. 29:5-9).”

In Jesus’ culture, a day began at night. As the first day began with darkness, and God spoke light into it, so our days begin with God’s spirit hovering over our lives as the details blur with the lengthening shadows of evening.

After an eventful Sabbath, the first day rose as the sun set. Mark frames our view through the doorposts of Peter and Andrew’s house. Rather than serving as a barricade against the undulating chaos of broken people gathering outside, the door opened to a new creation. The depressed, the anxious, the traumatized, the disturbed received their wits and grasped reality like they never had, or had long forgotten. The over medicated and uninsured extended their hands and receive health. God’s life poured irresistibly through his Son. Even the forces of evil could not refrain from declaring the good news. But Jesus silenced them. It is better to believe because of God’s good works than the devil’s word. Wholeness should speak louder than the last screech of a broken spirit.