god moving over the face of the waters
it took me exactly 14 minutes and 40 seconds to drive home from the coffee shop last night.

we had been talking about genesis. the first chapter. i liken it to a snapshot of how time begun, a point in which everything is shrouded in innocence and ignorance in the best way. the moment that snapshot was taken makes the story understandably different than if that snapshot had been taken minutes before, minutes later, centuries before, or centuries later. today, if someone were to sit down and write the genesis of life, we would have hundreds of years of scientific discoveries to factor in to the plot.

genesis 1 is intoxicatingly spiritual and earthy. every word, every detail is raw. everything is good. there are no rules, no commandments, no punishments (yet). the world god has created, by hand, makes god proud, happy, tired. this is the kind of faith i want - the kind of faith where you look at where the water meets the land and fall in love with it and it's creator. the kind of faith where you look at concrete as a sum of its parts and marvel at how dirt and water evolve so seamlessly into things you're not really supposed to look at and think of god.

i had just been given a CD, burned with a single track: Moby's "God Moving Over the Face of the Waters." it's 7 minutes and 20 seconds long. i slid the CD in as i pulled out of the parking lot. no words. the same four chords, cycling in the same meter, in the same order for 7 minutes and 20 seconds. but every time they cycle, they change. they grow and swell and dance with other melodies. as my car crested the I8 east - I805 north interchange i really did look at the concrete beneath me and around me, and i thought of how amazing it is that concrete exists. i felt the relationship between concrete and god. note that i hate concrete.

the song played twice on the ride home, exactly. i pulled my keys out of the ingition right as the final chord tapered into silence and the CD player made that "starting over" buzzing noise.

moby's song is taken from a phrase in the second line in the bible. "now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the spirit of god was hovering over the waters." i don't think that sentence means anything remarkably different to me than it did to someone thousands of years ago, before evolution was understood, before we stopped believing that women have more ribs than men.

i went back to the beginning, to that photograph of mankind's understanding of god and creation, to the gorgeous 7 minutes and 20 seconds of those same four chords, and to the beauty and majesty and mystery of my earth and my god. and i saw that it was good.