Importance of beginnings

 

Hayter for March 17, 2024

The importance of a beginning

 

          Last Sunday a dear friend of mine told me that she didn’t catch on to the beginning of my article, but did catch on to the last part. I considered it kind of her not to quit reading after the beginning.

          The message given to writers of any sort is to grab your reader at the very beginning. Virginia’s mom is my best example of that. I’ve mentioned how my adopted mom, Ruby Parker, would not finish one of my articles if she didn’t like the beginning of it. I’m guessing she didn’t read many of my articles.

Beginnings are tough for writers. I used the beginning of this morning’s article to set the groundwork for the rest of the piece. My favorite beginning to any of the books I’ve read is from “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger. It goes:

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all of that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

Salinger captured me with his beginning. He had an honest way of writing his story and managed to carry this reader along with him.

Yes, the beginning of a story, be it fiction or fact, needs to grab the reader. Kay does not judge a book by its beginning. That girl will read 70 or more pages of a novel before deciding that it isn’t worth her time. I tend to catch onto a bad read sooner than Kay.

 There is at least one book that begins with “In the Beginning…” It’s the best-selling book of all time. I don’t even know the beginning of me. The closest I can get is the time Dennis and I stood barefoot in the dirt waiting for a school bus to drop off my big sister Lynda, and our brother Larry.  As soon as the bus stopped, Larry hopped off and headed home. Lynda chose to divide her books up and let Dennis and me carry them home for her

I couldn’t have been over three years old at the time. When I tell that story, I usually get misty-eyed. There were other kids on the bus looking down at Lynda’s dirty brothers in their filthy shorts. I imagine they thought Lynda was crazy to spend time with two runny-nosed knot-heads. I have every confidence that God viewed the moment in a different light.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. “In the beginning.” What happens in the Bible’s beginning is baffling to me. Books have been written and sermons preached to help explain what happened after the beginning. Early believers were killed for their interpretations of scriptures, but for the past century or two, churches have merely disagreed with different interpretations.

          While I don’t care to discuss such things, I am curious about what was going on before “The Beginning”. Does infinity have a beginning? If not, there isn’t a beginning. There are only two responses to that. One is “I don’t know. I’m just curious.” The other is, “If God wanted us to know, He would’ve told us.” I’ve heard both answers used in different arguments.

          I’m a patron of the “I don’t know, but I’m curious” answer. One might ask, “If God didn’t want us to think about pre-biblical questions why did He give us the ability to think?”

It’s similar to the question about why God put the tree “of the knowledge of good and evil” into the Garden of Eden. He was bound to know what was going to happen. If Adam and Even couldn’t fight the temptation, what hope would there be for the rest of mankind? Before he was even a teenager, Cain would’ve climbed the Tree and grabbed a piece of fruit for himself. The boy had issues. 

Is there even such a thing as “time” in the infinity of eternity? Was there no beginning and will there be no end?  If God has always BEEN, then He must be infinity. That thought is beyond the scope of the human brain. All we can know is that we’re here now, and considering the aspect of Earth Time, we won’t be here long. All we can do is hope that as soon as we’re out of here, we will understand the concept of there being no end. And more than that, we will enjoy being in a time with no end.

Some of my friends believe that the afterlife will involve each of us tending a garden on a new Earth… forever. Adam and Eve didn’t handle it well, so perhaps we will. Fortunately, the Bible describes heaven as a place where "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined the things that God has prepared for those who love him.” From I Corinthians 2: 9.

Since my friends believe that we’ll be farming in heaven FOREVER, they have negated the possibility of us having to do that.  Remember,  “… no mind has imagined what God has  prepared for us…” Farming has been imagined, so we can’t be farmers. I doubt that’s what was intended from the passage, but sometimes you just have to go with what you got.

 In my case, I have no worries about what was happening before God created the heavens and the earth.  Unlike my dear old friend Ruby Parker, I just can’t help wondering about the unknowable. I’ve never been accused of being bright. But weird? Oh, yeah. – Next time, I’ll write about something more down-to-earth. What sayest thou?  

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