Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Shut in

I have embarked on a self-imposed project this week to once again attempt to read through the Bible (or most of it) this year. Shameful for this literature major to confess, but I have not yet read the whole thing through even once. I have read a lot of it, but I can't tell you where exactly the holes are.

It is like roman numerals. Some schools must cover roman numerals in fourth grade and some in fifth grade. We moved every few years with the military when I was young. I also skipped a grade around that time. The result: I cannot read the year on movie credits as I never learned roman numerals past about XX. Skipping parts of the Word of God is probably more problematic than knowing when the movie was made. I'm on day 6 and doing well, but it is days 29 and 72 I worry about.

Today, I read about Noah and The Flood. "The Lord shut them in." God shut Noah, his family and all the animals in the huge, cypress football field block of wood. He closed and sealed the door. Was it necessary for God to help because the door was so huge/heavy and Noah hadn't engineering a way to close it from the inside? I doubt Noah overlooked such a feature, given that he would want to be able to open the door from the inside later and he had apparently plenty of design and build time with a project that massive and only handmade hand tools. (Did you get that part -- he and his sons would have had to make the tools to make the boat!)

No, on this rainy day in Virginia, I fancy that God needed to shut the door because the people and the animals might have been reluctant to do so themselves. Last breaths of fresh air. Last glimpse of sky. Last bit of personal space. Perhaps too Noah wasn't quite sure what this flood thing really would be, if it would really really really come. He believed enough to build the boat. That is a lot of belief. But, to close the door on life as he knew it, his friends, his house, creation?


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