Devotion by Bill Lucke

I once accepted my daughter’s invitation to be part of a Career Day for a sixth grade class. I put together what I thought was a neat discussion comparing the work that chemists might do at Procter and Gamble or  EPA’s Breitenbach Laboratory on the UC campus. 

I was ready to dazzle my sixth graders, but when I reached the school, I was told the schedule had changed and I would be talking to a first grade class and all the dazzle disappeared. Instead, I showed them a video animation of how the universe developed following the Big Bang as an illustration of what a scientist might study. Always carry your laptop!

At the end, one little boy came up to me with a troubled look on his face. In a very soft voice he asked his question: “Did the dinosaurs come before God?” Obviously, he was getting conflicting data from different sources.

I told him that before God created the world, there was no time and that God was everywhere and everywhen.  This might not have been what his parents would want him to hear, but it was the best I had. 

At my age, the question is not so much about “before me” as it is about “after me”. I accept the promise that I will be “raised from the dead’ without fully understanding details. I expect to be surprised but not disappointed. 

Advent is a time of reflection, anticipation and expectation. We remember a time when God physically came into the world and everything changed about the way we understand who we are and what God wants from us. We anticipate His return and expect more changes, but can only speculate what those might be. But we have the comfort of knowing that God is not moving toward us, He is moving with us.