Once upon a time there was nothing.

Emptiness.

Nothing wasn’t the way God wanted things to be.

So he changed that.

At first he made the most basic things, beautiful in their very bare-vines essence. 

Light.

That one was so amazing he just sat with it for a while day, watching the contrast between it and darkness.

Sky.

Land.

Sun.

Stars.

When all the building blocks of the universe were there, grand and glorious, he looked and it was good.

But it wasn’t enough.

He wasn’t done.

He started to get more detailed.

Just really let his creativity go wild.

Plants. In rampant variety. Forming ecosystems. Interdependent. Beautiful. Alive.

Fish. The gorgeous and the weird. Filling the seas. Going into all the impossible places. Teeming. 

Insects. Tiny and intricate. Short-lived but truly alive. Operating independently but surviving as species. Insignificant and vital simultaneously.

Animals. The laughable and the terrifying. Growing. Adapting. Living with each other and off of each other. Forming patterns of behavior. Reacting to their environments in such varied ways that almost, almost you could call it thought.

This was all heart-stoppingly amazing. It was beautiful. It was intelligent. 

It was good.

From nothing. NOTHING. All of this.

And then he didn’t stop. This marvelous variety. This astonishing beauty. This infinity of space and detail. It wasn’t enough.

It was still too close to nothing.

It lacked. Intelligence. Risk. Pain. Forgiveness. Relationship.

So he made human beings.

And they were astonishing. Powerful and weak. Independent and utterly dependent. Full of knowledge and complete in their foolishness.

They immediately began to wreck everything. 

They did it so thoroughly, made so much ugliness, so quickly, that God had to start over.

But not from nothing.

He would never go back to nothing again.

Instead he shook the whole thing up, washed it over, rearranged it all.

A new beauty. A new beginning. This time with the added knowledge of how bad things could be. 

And so it went. Always and forever. Pain. Suffering. Evil. Healing. Recovery. Forgiveness. 

Death over and over again in real, full life.

Risk. Loss. Gain.

Something. (alive and terrifying and ever-changing and uncontrollable)

Filling the nothing.

Which will never come again.

And it is very, very good.