Echoes

(Gratuitous irony:  I'm going to use this title more than once and maybe a great many times.)

Echoes are everywhere.  I learned about the standard garden variety echoes of sound when I was a kid.  My mom taught me about them.  That is, what kind of terrain was likely to produce them and that generally speaking higher pitch tends to make an echo more pronounced and defined.

I think our kids first really encountered echoes at Dinosaur National Monument.  The Green River runs through the monument and the steep, winding and rock hard canyon walls set up some pretty decent echoes. Our kids spent a while yelling at one particular canyon wall that proved to be particularly resonant. 

There are other kinds of echoes in our lives.  Historians demonstrate this idea when they say, "Those who don't understand history are destined to repeat it."  This type of  "echo" can also be defined as a pattern or a recurring sequence.  I think the idea of echo though, captures the essence of the matter.

There are a couple salient points about the echo idea:

1. Echoes are always a derivative of a first event.  Something happened to make the "noise" that trickles down in other forms.
2. Each instance of the echo sounds recognizably like the first event but is usually quieter.  

In 1964 a pair of radio astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered background radiation that was present no matter where they pointed their telescope.  They eventually (1978) won the Nobel prize for their efforts.  Their cosmology, born of current scientific thought on the subject, suggested strongly to them that this noise was energy left over from the Big Bang.

Christians believe a good many different things about creation.  Some hold that the earth is young and was created in a literal 7 days.  Others hold that the seven day story of creation is metaphor.  This latter view in turn leads to a great many sub views that cover a spectrum of possibility regarding time and space and our place in same.

What's interesting I think is that regardless of your cosmology or theology, the energy found by Penzias and Wilson must be the echo of something.  And for the Christian, regardless of doctrine or cosmology, that background energy, that echo, must be the echo of God's creation and all the planning, love and subtlety that implies.  Indeed, it may even be the actual reverberation of the voice of God as described in John 1.

The Sons of Man live in creation and were spoken into it by Christ (again, see John, chapter 1).  Their creation was unique and pivotal.

The echoes of Christ's loving and creative voice are still resonating in all of us. 

If you listen quietly, you will hear the ongoing reverberation of Christ's creative voice in nearly every story (certainly every compelling one).  You will hear it in the voices of those you love and you will, with work, time, patience and grace, eventually even hear it in the lives and stories of your enemies and of those who have caused you hurt.  The more you hear it, the more you appreciate the value of each member of mankind.

And if we listen very quietly, we also occasionally hear a very small voice.  It is the voice that spoke us and that calls to us still.


1Ki 19:11  Then he was told, "Go, stand on the mountain at attention before GOD. GOD will pass by." A hurricane wind ripped through the mountains and shattered the rocks before GOD, but GOD wasn't to be found in the wind; after the wind an earthquake, but GOD wasn't in the earthquake;
1Ki 19:12  and after the earthquake fire, but GOD wasn't in the fire; and after the fire a gentle and quiet whisper.