Nov 12, 2017

 

Why Pain (6)

How do we respond to seemingly

Random acts of terror:

Makes us wonder:

If this pain is present,

Is there a loving God?

We will continue to look at the path to where we are today, following the path of creation through the onset of single cell life to what we see today: a vast complexity of interwoven strands of life having incredible diversity. But the truth is, all of life has a common thread, from the simplest of single cell life to the complexity of ourselves: DNA.

The DNA of all of life has amazing similarity, using only four chemical basis: called ACGT. It is the mutations of the four basic chemistry processes that create all of life in our world. These basic forms appeared about four billion years ago, and for three billion years remained very close to the original form, moving around our world and beginning the process of modifying our ball of stone to become what we know today. But it is only the past billion years that life as we know it began: and even then, the first 500 million years was spent adding oxygen to our atmosphere and balancing out the system to achieve better balance for life.

We do not understand how life first appeared on our planet, and several theories are trying to explain the process. We have never been able to produce life in the lab, but however it first came to our ball, it only took less than 100 million years to spread over the earth, and fossilized remains of what appears to be single-cell life have been scattered everywhere and found on ancient rocks in all corners, with the oldest dating about 4 billion years ago.

Today it is a delicate balance that maintains life: plant life transforms CO2 into free oxygen, storing the carbon in the plant roots and surrounds, producing coal and oil among many other useful parts. In turn, mobile animal and reptile forms take the oxygen in, creating CO2 for the plant life to consume.

Now all this seems just fine, and it should stop right here, thank you. But that is not how the engine of the universe is. it continues to adjust, modify, and change all parts of our world, introducing subtle changes in the DNA strings to slightly modify the internal structure of everything that is created new. Our atmosphere is filled with trillions of DNA modifiers that change our internal physical beings to see what works best – and that will continue throughout all of life. We, each of us, contain trillions of bio-cells that work to keep us healthy – most of the time – but sometimes work to make us ill, or to have disease. Illness is part of life, and it is impossible to live without changes occurring in our bodies. That is the nature of the same process that made our form of life possible, and will continue to make life in the future possible, with subtle changes occurring daily to all living creatures – including you and I. We contain trillions of symbiotic cells that live in our beings. These cells, not part of our human body but dwelling within, digest our food, eliminate our waste, adjust our bodies – and age us and make us ill.

So our God has designed the universe, and our physical part of that universe, as a self-renewing and self-growing organization. This constant stream of change in all things – not just our bodies but the very ground we walk on and air we breathe – as the essence of the universe. What I am saying is that earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and all else is operating as the mechanism that caused us, you and me, to evolve and reach the point where we can ask these deep questions: Why? And we have to add to that, knowing how we came to be this strange biped that somehow can ask and see all this ‘Why Not?’.

Thus I hope we can adjust to the truth of our ever-changing universe: we are born in this evolving world, and we will live in this evolving world until we move on.

Next we will look at the human side of pain: why does God allow others to cause so much pain in our world.

Meditation

My God, my Joy, my shelter; I surrender myself into your being. Continue to open me up to the truth that, as You expressed it through Jesus, the Kingdom of Heaven is within and in our midst – – if we but open our eyes to see. Our evolving universe has spun our life out of the dust of stars, and I find it astounding to see how beautiful and wonderful things are, despite the reality of change that is intrinsic to the constant changing universe.