The Beginning of Nations: Act One
Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being.
A portal opened over the sky and like a telescope, zoomed in to focus on a single female. My mouth fell open when I saw her. What was I expecting? A beauty? She was far from it. Her body was covered with thick wooly hair. Her face, flat, had features that barely showed emotion—at least none I was used to. But who could fault my surprise? This was my first time visiting the New Jerusalem History Museum.
I arrived in New Jerusalem not long ago and was just getting used to my new surroundings. It was quite overwhelming at first. But everyone kept telling me that I had to see 'The Beginning of Nations' exhibit. They told me it blew them away. It answered so many of the questions that had burdened them before they got here. So, with a tour group of about twenty, I watched the beginning, not of the cosmos, but the beginning of God's kingdom on Earth. And others in my group, like me, were seeing it for the first time.
The female in focus was very pregnant. Her leathery hands pressed firm against her swollen belly as she wobbled off on long limber legs to the edge of the savanna. There, she squatted down alone among the tall grasses.
Someone in the front row gasped. "Isn't anyone going to help her?"
Our tour guide, a patient old sage with wild whiteish hair, bobbled his head from side to side. "Their births took a few minutes, sometimes a few hours. But there was never a need for a midwife," he said.
I watched her bare feet grip the earth as she grasped each knee and bore down. Then with one long groan, a man-child slipped out from beneath her and landed with a plop, face-down in the dust. The mother turned him onto his back and with a swiftness almost too quick to see, swiped her finger through the muck in his mouth, freeing him to gasp at the sun-drenched air. He sucked in the life-giving substance and filled his tiny lungs with it — and cried — loudly. The mother fell back into the dust with her hands pressed tight to her ears. Her face, through the reeds, looked somewhat like a mix of terror and confusion as his piercing wails rose up and rippled the sky.
Others in her clan, a short distance away, took notice, but no one moved. No one but the largest male. He lumbered towards the sound with his face pursed like a prune. The mother looked over her shoulder and picked the man-child up from the ground. She shoved his face into her breast, not to feed him, but to silence him as she hurried into the darkness of the nearby forest. It was there she laid him under the shade of a tree. She didn't even look back when she left.
"Why did she abandon him?", someone behind me asked, their voice reeking with disdain. They were as appalled as I was.
The tour guide fondled the few hairs left on his chin. "Her behavior was not uncommon … or immoral. Many infants and toddlers were discarded, or killed if they did not appear viable." He turned his attention back to the portal. "But, now watch … the single most important event in the history of the nations."
And I did watch, breathless, as God, our father, rushed down the stairway, from sky to land for the man-child's cry had come up before him—his very own breath had returned to him at last. He took the man-child to himself in a loving embrace and called him Adam. He was the first of his kind and the image that God had been longing for.
The portal over the ancient sky closed and our seats turned in unison to face a giant screen. The tour guide turned to face us. His ancient eyes twinkled.
"The next part of the story happens right here … in paradise."
