Creating something new out of nothing and everything…

I recently heard a friend preach and she used this line to refer to God’s work of shaping new from what already is… I heard it, wrote it down immediately, and then felt a niggle of familiarity once the words settled…

A new way of saying it, but hm, this collective of nothing and everything as the foundation of creation has me nodding and saying yes, okay…I too am made of this nothing and everything…I wasn’t…and then I was…image and likeness of God…water, cells, time, nourishment, love, imagination, possibility…. My favourite tree in the Gardens, the dahlias, sweet Waldo (cat) in all of his operatic asymmetry… Yes. While, simultaneously, if I stop and think about this for any length of time, it makes both more and less sense and that combination is an endless pool of wonder to me.

‘Twas ever thus and will always be…this utter outpouring of everything into nothing to create something. The call is to forever remember this…Not so much the ‘twas ever thus part…The mirror tells me that. But the ‘will always be’…the bringing to be that implies change and all of its component pieces—loss, grief, hope, uncertainty, doubt, potential, choices… And, startling, it isn’t only what can or will be made apart from me…outside of me… but With me…with the component pieces of my being…mind, heart, imagination, gift, challenge, experience, humanity… With the everything—and the nothing of what is unknown, mysterious, not yet revealed.

Everything…that fullness…that is knowable and also well beyond my grasp…my hope…and my imagination…which seems to approach the ‘nothing.’. Hm…what if the two are not so far apart? What if God’s Everything incorporates the Nothing—that is not a wasteland or a void of any sort…but is a richness of potential/possibility that is so…much of a muchness…that my humanity is left with a whooooaaaaaa instead of anything I can currently imagine.

Pause.

Isn’t that what awe does? What love and trust and even faith filled desperation does? What so many experiences of God’s nearness do? Bring us to a point…where the invitation is to open all the way…to loosen and release into God’s totality…which is Everything and Mystery. And then come away by a different road. Come away newly shaped, newly aware, newly More…and then be that More…live it in such a way that is good for the greater whole…

Creating something new out of everything and nothing…it’s the work of a composer, a potter, a poet, an artist…a loving God who will never be apart from, who will never let go.

Who is endlessly enticing, often challenging, boundless mystery, greatest wonder, truest home.