Article July 23, 2007 Issue

TAKING OUR WORLD INTO THE ARK

BY LUCIE LEHMANN-BARCLAY

THE MORE I READ and hear about the perceived dangers from global warming to our earth and its living creatures, the more I'm reminded of the story of Noah and the Ark (see Gen., chaps. 6—9). Recently, I took the time to reread this story and ponder what it has to offer us today in a global context.

First off, this story tells me that just as Noah took God's creation into a physical ark, I, too, can take every aspect of creation into my own mental ark—that is, into an expanding spiritual understanding of creation. And if Noah had a big job building a boat, well, this is an equally big mental undertaking. I've found it's a continuing demand to see God's spiritual creation right where matter, and especially disorganized or destructive material situations, appear to be. Yet to do this seems just as imperative as the divine command that came to Noah to build an ark and do his part in preserving God's creation.

In fact, I view today's widely reported symptoms and projections of global destruction as directly related to other kinds of dire predictions that would deny one's God-given mental and physical perfection—such as medical diagnoses, and other bodily disturbances. The only difference is that global prognoses are magnified on a far larger scale.