On this first Monday of the year, we begin at the beginning.

The New Year is always a good place to start at the beginning. With its proverbial flip of the calendar and clean slate, we launch our 2021 resolutions: recalibrating the aims and goals for our lives. We often limit this recalibration to making order out of chaos in our bodies, homes, and routines. But how might we also re-center ourselves spiritually?

Today’s reading is what biblical scholars consider the first of two distinct Genesis Creation narratives. In these verses, God demonstrates God’s power by creating order from formlessness. Dark and edgeless, this mass of dis-order are the waters over which God’s ruach (spirit or wind) hovers, preparing to create light. From this sweep emerges harmony: day and night.

Note that the creation of light does not deem the darkness “bad.” It just is. The light, however, is called “good.” In the ancient times in which this narrative was shared, God’s “intrusion” of power and presence to create light from shapelessness would have been reassuring. It is even comforting to us now. Even where there is disorder, God is still at work.

We have all experienced confusion amid chaos. As on a moonless night at the ocean’s edge, it’s impossible to distinguish depth or boundaries. Where does one expanse end and the other begin? But God spoke order into being: “Let there be light,” and there was. So it is in our lives too.

Even as baptized Christians, how many times do we doubt God’s ability to shine amid a void? How many times do we miss the ways in which God is creating in what we experience as a formless chaos that threatens to drown us? How many times do we wish to be the creators of the world, rather than trusting the Divine Architect’s ability to make something out of nothing?