Precious Lives
When the storm ends, we still need to wait until the waters dry up before we can go out again.
At the end of forty days Noah opened the window of the ark that he had made and sent out the raven; and it went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth. Then he sent out the dove from him, to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the ground; but the dove found no place to set its foot, and it returned to him to the ark, for the waters were still on the face of the whole earth. So he put out his hand and took it and brought it into the ark with him. He waited another seven days, and again he sent out the dove from the ark; and the dove came back to him in the evening, and there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf; so Noah knew that the waters had subsided from the earth. Then he waited another seven days, and sent out the dove; and it did not return to him any more. In the six hundred first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from the earth; and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and saw that the face of the ground was drying. In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth was dry. Then God said to Noah, “Go out of the ark, you and your wife, and your sons and your sons’ wives with you. Bring out with you every living thing that is with you of all flesh birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth so that they may abound on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.” So Noah went out with his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives. And every animal, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that moves on the earth, went out of the ark by families. Then Noah built an altar to the Lord, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And when the Lord smelled the pleasing odor, the Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” - Genesis 8:6-22
Imagine what it must have been like living on the ark with all those animals.
We do what we have to do to survive. If it means living in cramped quarters, or out under the stars like some do today, we somehow manage, so long as we have the will to survive.
This story is about resolve.
Noah not only obeyed God, but put his family through hell in the process, because he believed it was the only way to survive.
He had no way of knowing what the new world would be like. Nor did he know what it would take to get there.
But when he finally set food on dry ground once again, he praised God and offered a sacrifice.
I feel bad for the animals sacrificed. They never knew the land, for they must have been born on the ark.
Others, too, would have been slaughtered for food.
When the whole world is so close, we have a different perspective. Every living thing was on the ark, and they were in limited supply.
What that teaches us is the world is precious. Every living thing is important to our survival and theirs.
In stepping out of the ark, Noah and his family probably knew every living thing they encountered, and they knew them personally, having lived with them.
Every life had value to them and to God.
Today is a good day to stop and think about that. Imagine if we treated each other and all life as though everyone was precious to us.
More to come...