Who am I

During my early adulthood there was a time in my life when I explored if what I had been taught through the majority of my existence about God, Life, and Spirituality was true. I was hurt, bitter, and very angry. I had almost completely walked away from God. However, God had not walked away from me. He built in me a curiosity to not just believe what I was told but to find out the truth for myself. I truly wanted to be certain that what I had built my belief system around was real. I am not so stubborn that I would continue to believe a lie if the truth was presented to me. Or was I? So, for the first time in my life I dug into alternative studies outside the biblical foundations of what I had been taught growing up. 

After several months of study, it became very clear that there is not a single path on this topic but instead many many paths defined by many theories. So many in fact that it was hard for me to summarize everything into a single thought process that would make sense for me to use as a foundation. There was nothing I could follow to where I was truly happy. There are thousands and thousands of papers, books, and videos by hundreds and hundreds of scientists, doctors, and mathematicians who have spent much of their lives studying and creating theories using all sorts of algorithms and formulas to try and explain how something came from nothing. Then over millions of years evolved into complex life forms being hurled through the void of space in this complex and organized universe living on this beautiful planet that has been perfectly balanced to sustain all sorts of complex life. It did not answer the basic fundamental question, who am I? 

I researched to try and understand where love, peace, hope, and forgiveness evolved from. After countless attempts to try to define and write at least an extremely high-level synopsis, I became extremely confused and frustrated and stepped away from my studies for a few days. When I picked my study back up again determined to make sense of it I found this article titled “Stephen Hawking's 'No Possibility' of God in Our Universe“ published on Livescience which basically sums it up in a nice little package. 

He writes "I think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science. If you accept, as I do, that the laws of nature are fixed, then it doesn't take long to ask: What role is there for God?"

"If you like, you can say the laws are the work of God, but that is more a definition of God than a proof of his existence," Hawking wrote.

"Did God create the quantum laws that allowed the Big Bang to occur?" Hawking wrote. "I have no desire to offend anyone of faith, but I think science has a more compelling explanation than a divine creator."

"The universe itself, in all its mind-boggling vastness and complexity, could simply have popped into existence without violating the known laws of nature," he wrote.

Hawking's answer, then, to what happened before the Big Bang is, "there was no time before the Big Bang."

"We have finally found something that doesn’t have a cause, because there was no time for a cause to exist in," Hawking wrote. "For me this means that there is no possibility of a creator because there is no time for a creator to have existed in."

"We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe," Hawking concludes the first chapter of his final book, "and for that, I am extremely grateful. 

During my months of study into these theories, I truly tried to find the answers to the questions of: Who am I? 

However, I could not find one answer to any of these questions. All these men and women who are far more intellectual than I am over thousands of combined years of study have not been able to answer life’s basic fundamental questions that every single human asks. Hawking basically sums life as he sees it in a nutshell when he states:

 “We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that, I am extremely grateful.” 

Basically telling us that this life is it. Be grateful and enjoy it while you can because once it’s over there is nothing else you die and are then forgotten. 

The scientific community uses long drawn out explanations but the base use-case is still the same, that we are accidental worthless beings with no point to our existence. What's ironic is these men and women study and research relentlessly spending billions of dollars going to the ends of the earth in trying to disprove our purpose. It still baffles my mind why anyone would want to prove a theory that results in such a feeling of void and emptiness for the entire human race. The fundamental results of all their study is contradictory to its purpose where they are searching for the reason behind the meaning of life, to which they find there is none.  

However in Genesis 2:7 in one verse the Bible says it all. If you break down this one verse and study it you can clearly understand how intimately God loves us just by how He created us and brought us into existence. 

Gen 2:7a “And the Lord God formed man.” 

The meaning of “formed” is “to make or fashion into a certain shape.” Our Creator did not speak us into existence He stopped to fashion and shape us. Think about that for a second. Everything else that was created was by God’s spoken word. He spoke and there it was, which in itself is pretty mind-blowing. However when it came to creating His prize and center piece of all his creation God stepped into the world He created, and like a potter who has the intellectual power to form and shape his creation thoughtfully and meticulously formed us. God, with His own hands, formed and crafted every cell, atom, and DNA strand of who we are. I like the way David expresses it in Psalms 139:13  “For You formed my innermost parts; you knit me together in my mother's womb.”

We are not a close cousin to the monkey or some distant relative to some form of fungus, each of us are the unique and perfect work of God’s own hands. He made us great, wonderful, and different, we are the very best of all of God’s creation. 

Then, after He formed us with His own hands the second part of Genesis 2:7b goes on to say, “...and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.”  This verse shows us that God loved us more than everything else He created and that He wanted to have a personal intimate relationship with us. God could have casually spoken the lifeless human form He created to life. However, God took a more intimate approach. God leaned over and looked into the face of Adam and breathed His own breath, His breath of life into Adam’s nostrils. Everything that God is was imparted into Adam with that single breath. What is the significance of God breathing his breath into Adam? An article posted by Smithsonian Magazine on April 5, 2013 published the following: 

"We're all unique snowflakes, as evidenced by our fingerprints. But our prints and DNA are not the only features individualized to each of us. New research shows that our breath, too, can be used as a unique identifying feature, thanks to the varying assemblies of internal microbes that inhabit our bodies. To discover these unique “breathprints,”  Science Now reports, scientists recruited volunteers to blow into a mass spectrometer, a machine often used in chemistry to separate chemical components of different samples. Within seconds, the mass spectrometer spit out results for each person. These breathprints not only vary between individuals, the researchers found, but also change throughout the day within individuals in reflection of shifting chemical reactions within the body. But a unique core signature always underlies a person’s breath, to the point that it could be used to identify the individual participants in the study."

I found this pretty profound that the first breath that man ever took was the Breathprint of God. God's unique core signature was breathed into Adam. Why did I find this profound? Because the transfer of oxygen into the blood is through simple diffusion. The oxygen molecules move, by diffusion, out of the capillaries and into the body cells around the entire body. Meaning that with that first breath God, on a molecular level, infused all of who He is into Adam. Nothing else in all of God’s creation was infused with the breathprint of God, which means that all of human existence started with the intimate act of God breathing His unique core signature into Adam. On a molecular level, our cells have been infused with God’s presence. Which is why we are so lost and hopeless without Him but yet are so complete and have peace with Him. Our very cells were created to crave the intimate presence of God.  

I like to imagine Adam when he took that first breath opened his eyes and saw God leaning over him smiling and deeply in Love with the perfect Being He just made. I can only imagine it was a similar feeling that new moms and dads get when they look into the face of their newborn child for the first time. The love you feel is indescribable and completely overwhelming. God looks at us the same way, every time He looks at us and we look back to Him the overwhelming love and joy He feels for us is indescribable.  You and I are not here by a series of mindless gassy explosive accidents, longing to be justified by years of empty research. We have been crafted and formed by a loving Creator who wants us to quiet the noise in our lives so that His loving voice is the only thing we hear. 

Who am I? I am the unique creation of a loving God who desires me and wants to have fellowship with me just as I am. He desires me despite all my faults, mistakes, and messes. I am the child of a good God who is the Creator of all life who loved me so much that He stepped into time and created such a majestic and beautiful home but He did not stop there. Because of our mess, bad decisions, and stubbornness, He sent His Son to be the sacrifice in our place. To shed his blood, and die a brutal death on a cross, so that we could live a life of wholeness, happiness, and peace. All he asks of us is to take time daily to  sit in His presence and allow Him to love us. When we do He will show us who he created us to be and our searching for answers outside of Him will be over. It is in this place where I have found my purpose, to be loved by Him.