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”God’s splendor is a tale that is told, written in the stars.  Space itself speaks his story through the marvels of the heavens. His truth is on tour in the starry vault of the sky, showing his skill in creation’s craftsmanship. Each day gushes out its message  to the next, night by night whispering its knowledge to all— without a sound, without a word, without a voice being heard, yet all the world can hear its echo. Everywhere its message goes out. What a heavenly home God has set for the sun, shining in the superdome of the sky!” PS 19:1-4 (TPT)

This psalm took over as heartbeat as I thought about how there really is nothing like being completely undone at the wonder of creation; something about the uncontrollable and beautiful that stirs within us freedom and surrender. An unrelenting invitation—it acquaints itself with our weathered hearts, beckoning us to take a conscious breath. Man continues to make places by the fiercest seas and climb mountains too large to ever comprehend at risk and end of our own living. We spend on decades—studying, learning and getting lost in wonder and the wild because through every discovery is a step closer to the hands who made us all—Yours.We make art and write poetry, hoping to find the bridge between us and everything around us that exists; echoing the desire to close the chasm that sits where language, colour, anatomy, ritual, form, understanding and life happens—because we innately believe we’re all connected. Yet how does Man and creation find reconciliation except through first looking back at the original design that is Genesis, and how God made us for this world—to enjoy it, to care for it and to be in a daily collaboration with Him.More than all that God dreamed for Man to experience in the garden, was the sheer delight He found in walking and talking with us. Something about Genesis reveals His excitement and enjoyment towards us—dusty clay figures He formed and breathed His own breath into. These same dusty clay figures He then went on to endlessly pursue and call, His very own family. Treasure of His own heart.A merry-go-round discovery will continue to point us back towards this kinship in which He created us for—to be a reflection of Himself. Through this relationship between God and Himself, God and Creation, God and us, then us and creation, we get to find that He is not just Creator, but a Lover of creating, a Lover of heart and soul, and a Lover of life itself. He knew the kind of mess it would take to form us, the kind of pain it would take to lose us, and then the kind of wait to win us back, and He committed to all of it anyway.

I took a little walk with a beautiful friend last night.

The ground was lit with electronic stars embedded beneath our feet, and the night sky with real ones, just so faintly but alluring enough for us to crank our necks toward the sky over the next twenty minutes, wondering how far and how wide it must all be—this enchanting blanket of mystery. A mystery we never will comprehend, and yet we try.

My friend asks in frustrated wonder: Do you think there is more to what we cannot see? Do you think that someday we will find, that in our human bodies we’ve missed out on all the beauty and dimensions that has always been and always was right there, the whole time?

I too felt the rush of that thought, something I’d always ached to know and hopefully discover one day.

She continues to muse: How is it- there are stars and universes continuously being created, yet we are the only life forms of our kind? Are there more beings out there? If they’re different, what do you think they look like?

And it dawned within me that perhaps, all of our dead ends were meant to tell the same story over and over again. Perhaps, each discovery considered as a leap for mankind toward decoding origin, was actually a single step into what has always been the story that we were asleep to. Every breakthrough for science, a revelational blackhole. One leads to the mystery of another. 

Humans caught in a cyclical limitation: We have sighted a new star, yet we cannot touch it. We have located hundreds of universes but cannot reach them. The list grows on, and the answers we land upon lead only to more questions.

If the answer is in the question, perhaps the mystery is the answer to the question of mystery.

Perhaps the mystery is in knowing that God cannot help but create, and that though He does, there is nothing else created in His image the way we are. Perhaps in this extravagant beauty and unattainable comprehension, is the humble revelation that at the heart of creation, is the mirror of His heart towards us: All that He cannot contain himself to give us, all we cannot understand to receive Him and beyond it—that all He wants, is us.

The greatest love story is told in cyclical repetition all around us: in light, in shadow, in color and form and symmetry, and in all of living and in passing away. A God, who is able to make endlessly and vastly, extraordinarily and overwhelmingly above and beyond all that we can comprehend, desire, or know. A God who cannot help but be and own all that was mentioned. Yet, He wants us. An all-consuming God, consumed by this desire for us that He chooses to contain himself as a foetus, to be abandoned to the mercy of our flawed finiteness.