Jim's Primeval Journey: Curiosity

I am enchanted with Genesis 1-11. I get goosebumps. God’s word on how it all started. I think a lot about the stuff in those few chapters. It has such a cool nickname: The Primeval Narrative. “Belonging to the first or earliest ages.” More goosebumps.

Another thing I think a lot about is my baggage. I live with debris from my own “earliest ages.” I had wonderful Christian parents and a great brother and sister, all the essentials and a bunch of happy adventures. Nothing falling into the categories normally thought to require therapy or steps or healing. But I’ve still got stuff. And stuff is stuff. I live with it because it shaped me.

In a creepy, cool way, my pondering of the Primeval Narrative and my processing of childhood occasionally meet up. The revelations about our primeval history speak into the musings about my own “primeval history.” No surprise here: approaching the Bible, I bring all my baggage. As I try to interpret the Bible, it interprets me. Helpfully.

I was curious. I was filled with curiosity about bugs, woods, animals, clouds, stars, rocks. I assume you were too; it’s just the stuff of being a kid. Kid’s stuff – but real and wondrous. Here’s how it was for me. Being a boy in the 60’s, scientific discovery was the air we breathed. The space race was the biggest and most obvious. I was 10 when we made it to the moon. But there were other strong voices. My teachers in grades 4, 5 and 6 were three men who had not lost their sense of wonder. All three: Mr. Haakenson, Mr. Hitzeman, and Mr. Bylund were just big kids when it came to science. They had the bug, and it was contagious. I think all us boys aspired to be scientists because of those men.

I heard other voices too: National Geographic specials on PBS, Jacques Cousteau’s adventures, the specials about the Craighead family and their adventures in the American west, books from Scholastic Book Services, especially the Danny Dunn science adventure books, and “The Adventures of the Mad Scientist’s Club.” I had the science and nature bug so bad that I used my allowance money to collect at least a dozen Golden Nature Guides on rocks, fossils, zoology, pond life, mammals, reptiles and amphibians, trees…

And our family adventures fed my curiosity about nature. Fishing for sunfish and crappies with Dad and Bob fed the dreams for future adventures in nature. Archery became a major summer hobby for Bob and me, and fed a longing for adventure and exploration. But when I got into rocks, that was the quantum leap for me: hunting for agates in northern Minnesota, using paper route money to buy specimens at rock shops, reading books about rock collecting and geology, fossil hunting along the bluffs of the Mississippi River.

I won’t try to sort out all the pieces that led me to choose ministry over minerals (theology over geology – sorry). But the kid still lives. And this time of year, the bug takes hold – I get infected all over again.

“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it…So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all the livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field.” (Genesis 2:15, 19, 20). Adam was a gardener and a zoologist—with occasional goosebumps, I bet.

This aspect of my boyhood—a consuming, thrilling curiosity about the wonders of creation—really is a God thing. I know we rightly end up in Romans 1 and the theological assertion that God’s existence is evident in his creation. I know that, and I always end up there. But today, I’m doing what I did countless times as a boy: I’m lingering, enjoying the wonders, and rubbing down goosebumps.