Saturday, March 28, 2009

Each life

Every life is a masterpiece in 4 dimensions, a colorful, animated sculpture with a soul.

This week God has been working in my life in completely unexpected ways. Since Sunday (see my latest post) I have started reading A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. I picked it up off the shelf in my mom's library on Monday night and packed it to read on the train up to San Francisco. The train ride lasted two hours, and in that two hours I only read 24 pages. The reason I spent so much time in those first pages is that every time I read about a new concept, a new way to look at the world, whether I had heard it before or not, I was completely floored.

As I have been contemplating nature lately, I have been completely awed at the Creator behind the work of art that is our world, and reading about the vast universe just outside our front door, I was even more taken aback. Particularly, the concept of space time and time as a dynamic dimension, rather than the static entity we usually imagine it as completely blew my mind.

Hawking continues on and talks about general relativity and how it predicts it's own shortcomings as it predicts the big bang event. This is called a singularity, the point at which a theory cannot predict what came before, or what comes after it. What we do know about the big bang is that before it happened all the matter and energy in the universe was concentrated in an infinitely small and infinitely dense point of matter and energy. And then God spoke.

Think about that. God spoke the entire universe into existence. His voice, His breath, His love all have such great power, and such unbelievable beauty. We are experiencing only the smallest slice of this great work of art that is the universe, and we still consider it a masterpiece. Imagine looking down on it then, from God's perspective, this infinitely small point of matter and energy exploding, or perhaps more appropriately blooming into the hundreds of thousands of millions of galaxies full of hundreds of thousands of millions of stars, each with it's own solar system, each full of it's own natural wonders. And thats just the universe in 4 dimensions.

Now think about every life intertwined in four dimensions, meeting here, diverting there, forming a beautiful tapestry. But such a metaphor quickly fails as each life deserves so much more representation than just a line, or a string, even in three dimensions. Add to that the fact that there are several more dimensions, which have no realistic visual representation in our own three dimensional perspective, and the word tapestry seems to be a cheap substitute for something more beautiful than we can possibly imagine, perhaps more than we could ever perceive, let alone appreciate.


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