Ph: Life: Glimmerings Of Truth Poem by Brian Johnston

Brian Johnston
January 29,2016

Cliff notes:
When I started this poem I called it Aphorisms. The first stanza came to me during an afternoon nap and after working hard on a 2nd stanza I realized how hard it was going to be to build a poem that had its own meaning purely out of aphorisms even if some of them were original with me.

As you know my chief methodology when writing a poem is to ask myself 'What's Next? ' Rarely do I really know where a poem is headed from the git go. That was the case here. The first line of the 3rd stanza brought me to a screeching halt but its Scientific truth opened the poem to more complexity. Thinking of words that would rhyme with whirlwind and could end softly was my plan of attack. Sinned seemed an interesting choice but would normally end hard not soft. I was stunned by the line that emerged.

All Christians are familiar with the idea of original sin and frankly it has always grated on me. A part of the paradox is that we are told that God loves us even before we are conceived and yet somehow we are born sinners? It seems a paradox. But suddenly I jumped from the idea that the very nature of sin is separation from God (which I had always thought of as choice) to the idea that if God create us separate from Himself then being separate may be sinful, but it is not our choice. God made us sinful and there must be a reason for that. It helps to explain too how He has always loved us. Once I had the 3rd & 4th lines then the 2nd line was a snap.

If the 3rd stanza in revealing, the 4th stanza is a miracle. Reconciling the Bible with Evolution has always been a goal for me because Science is a gift from God and so, I believe, is the Bible. And I long ago concluded that if Science and the Bible are in conflict then it must be the Bible that is misunderstood and that our prejudices about scripture then need to be examined.

In the 4th stanza I realized that Science and Evolution being true, that even the basic elements of creation themselves, non-living atoms like hydrogen 'evolve' given time towards life. Sentient life is in fact inevitable because of the character of God's Big Bang.

Hydrogen condenses into stars which ignite spontaneously when they gather enough material, stars consume their fuel and then explode when they get old creating all the non-hydrogen elements. It is the dust created by star factories that provide the building blocks of life, and from which life itself must arise given the right conditions. The God who accomplished all this was so incredible that after the Big Bang human beings were inevitable and God did indeed breathe life into dust just as the Bible says.

Human vanity says the we are the divine end of God's creation but Evolution and Science tell us that creation itself is in its infancy! Imagine the possibilities!