Making a Bad Situation Worse

I recently spent some time at the Writers Conference at The Dock Academy near Philadelphia and was looking back over some old notes of previous conferences. I couldn't help but remember the time that going to the conference in Denver provided an opportunity to spend some nights at the home of Deb Rainey, an acclaimed women's writer. What a delightful time that was! She is a prolithic author who really loves her work. I remembered her magic formula for putting together a storyline -- come up with a bad situation and then make it worse! Someday her fertile mind will be unable to imagine how to make things worse! Fortunately, the cable news networks have taken up that post and have relieved her of that responsibility!

But talking about bad situations that can hardly be made more bleak. I was thinking about the situation that God put himself in when he determined that he wanted to do some creating. As I was flying up the Eastern coastline the other day, returning from Florida, I watched the sun poke its way above the thin, red line of the horizon. I stared at its emerging brilliance and remembered that what it was engaged in doing day-after-day was forging new elements -- carbon, oxygen, and iron -- out of the primordial hydrogen and helium. Its size determines that it will eventually use up all of its fuel and shrink into a white dwarf. (Not to worry; not in my lifetime!) But its much larger cousin stars would suffer a different fate -- fusing into an iron core and then collapsing into a neutron star, bursting apart in a massively energetic collapse that we call a supernova. These explosions would seed the universe with all the elements of the periodic table. Gravity would eventually pull those elements back together into asteroids and planetoids. And now imagine God, some years later, looking down at one particular conglomeration of those elements, a boiling, bubbling planetoid that we call earth and thinking, "All I really wanted out of this creation is something with which I can have uncoerced fellowship! Instead my creativity has produced an 8,000 mile diameter blob of molten magma!" I don't think it could get any more bleak than that! Fortunately, his unrestrained creativity was able to add some pixie dust like life and spirit to that formless blob and -- well you know the rest of the story! It's now something that we can ponder and write about!

It's one thing for a potter to sit down at his wheel and figure out how they are going to fashion an elegant vase out of a lump of clay. It would be quite another thing if they first had to figure out how to grind up a granite boulder to make that lump of clay. Or worse, how to create the constituents of granite in the first place!