There is a vast wide world out there. The sun blazes down, raising seedlings from the dirt and slowly breaking down vast swathes of life to the dust from which they sprang. And I am sitting in my office, typing on my little laptop, watching a few sprouts grow in plastic pots under a lamp I brought from Canadian Tire for seventeen dollars.
There is a vast wide world out there and we can ignore it if we like. Reality goes on churning the churn of creation outside our doors, yet inside we huddle up and stack our sticks and straw until we have something we call My Reality. Home sweet home. But the larger reality outside our doors keeps huffing and puffing at our door.
A mosquito buzzes around the office. “How did you get in here, all the way to basement? I’ve not opened a window in here for days just to keep the likes of you out.” My terrarium of drywall and glass is apparently permeable, imperfect. Shutting out the intrusion of reality is tough stuff.
Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
Genesis 11:4
The tower of Babel is a story that begins in the realm of the absurd but becomes more plausible the more you think about it. We would like to be the architects our world and will attempt construction with whatever resources and technology we have readily available. A child will contentedly build a fort in the living room to this end. The truly inhumane situation of zoos is that we have not been able to construct suitable ones for ourselves. But our track record at constructing our own reality is abysmal.
So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.
Genesis 11:8
This may be annoying but a moment’s reflection will tell us that it is in fact positive. We need God. If you want to meet a truly unhappy person, find someone who has received everything they ever wanted. Happy are those who long for Utopia, happier than those who have actually been able to create it.
Though at this time I may find myself isolated from a wider world, I am not better for pretending it does not exist.
Lord, you are the Truth.
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