I can’t help but project a little when I think of Noah. A man, not perfect but trying to live a good life, who is removed from his environment and place in a much smaller space with only his close family and thousands of new creatures that he doesn’t understand. With his world view utterly changed he then places his life and the lives of those with him in the hands of the Creator as the world is covered in a flood that destroys almost everything that Noah understood as ‘life’.

So many of us, I’m sure, can relate. Coming from traditions that are so foreign to us now, we also listened to God when we heard His command but for us it was, ‘you shall place no other God before my face.’ We also became removed from our known worlds, watched as so many friends and family members, social groups and communities washed away. We were left feeling alone, not understanding how to communicate with those around us and thinking, ‘I wonder if my feet with ever touch the earth again’.

Noah must have wondered, ‘when this water calms and fades, will the corpses of the previous world lay as signposts to the life I knew?’

My own personal experience was that once the storms had fades and I had settled on firm land, once I understood what I believed and had studied out the text to a point that I have no further questions as to why my faith in a ‘new testament’ was in error.. as that point the connection to the bodies of my pre-flood era vanished. Just as the text says, the old was washed away and while that was comfortable for me and made the transition easier I regret that personal faith can cause such division in people. I also get that the flood was about division, about starting over, about owning your own environment and shaping it into something that is safe for you and that shines a good reflection back towards the Creator when people look on.

If you are currently in the throes of the storm, your old world under a blanket of grey and your horizon violently moving your understanding of your faith, just hold on.. you aren’t the first and it gets so much easier.

If you need to reach out, please do.