As time moves forward, the physical reality we live in gets more broken apart.
The galaxies, solar systems, planets, all move further away from each other, faster and faster.
If everything continues the way it’s going, scientists theorize, one day everything will just spread out into what will be “nothingness” since everything will be so far apart.
Any order that exists, then, seems to be a temporary “accident”. Or a miracle.
Perhaps the biggest constant within the universe, then, is chaos. Or, at least, a lack of unity.
And so it is with us.
As time moves forward, if we are people who are interested in growth and evolution, well then we are more likely to find more chaos. We’ll discover more wrong around us. We’ll realize that many of the truths we held to be self-evident no longer are. The order around us will break down, but mainly because we’ll see how truly unordered the world is.
In fact, this is one of the defining hallmarks of maturity. When we are young, we see the world as unshakeable, as the people around us as the pillars that hold it up. People know things, and in our minds, we were just waiting for our moment to be one of the knowers.
But then we discover, one sad day, that no one really does know, that we are all children looking for answers until the day we die.
And so, if we let the natural order of things simply continue, why then, by the end of our lives we will reach the same point the predictors of the end of the universe assume we’ll reach.
But we are peculiar animals, aren’t we? We’re given these minds, these hearts, these souls. And within each is a capacity for something that the universe can never understand. Something beyond any natural law of entropy.
We can reverse the order of reality. We can transform chaos into order. We can build while everything seems to be ready-made to break down.
No matter what happens, humans seem intent on building. We have built city after city only to see them get wiped out by natural disasters, by war, by people simply moving to greener pastures. And yet, we keep building more cities. Bigger ones.
Cultures are built out of the spark of ideas. Knowledge is built like any physical structure, with every bit accumulated adding to the compendium of truth, the encyclopedia of humanity. Morality becomes a ladder for each generation to reach higher and higher.
Of course, there are always the people, the humans, that are only plugged into chaos. The ones who bring us conflict, war, crime, a desire to go backwards instead of forward. We like to think them the aberrations of humanity, but they are really just the most animalistic, the most natural… the most human.
The miracle is that somehow the ones who build continue winning, continue breaking all the rules that the universe built around them. In a world where things are meant to break down, in which destruction is easier, normal-er, and natural-er, it would seem that they would be the losers, and our world would not have gone from cave men to where we are now. We should be like other animals, living on instinct alone, any structure implanted by our genes, and waiting for the world’s natural forces to cause us to go extinct.
We are living a miracle. Every moment we use technology, or walk around without fearing for our lives, or look at art… we are experiencing that which should not be.
And all of that is wonderful. And meaningful. And important.
But what does it say about us?
What does it say about us if we choose to continue down the emotional and rational world that leads to us having less and less faith in the world around us? Less a feeling of solidness? More chaos, internally?
It doesn’t mean anything so bad. Just that we are human. Just that we are going with the flow of the universe. Appearing, then slowly breaking apart, then finally disappearing.
This isn’t a life that is so different than much of what we associate with day-to-day existence. War may be the extreme version, but it exists all around us. The arguments on social media. The divisive politics of the day. The demonizing of those we see as other. The internal cynicism that seems to creep in no matter what we do to stop it.
Those things are simply the natural order of things, and the fact that we are surprised they happen shows just how little we realize what a miracle we are living. Why is social media so toxic, for example? Because it has caused a break in the etiquette and norms that the “builders” of the past constructed. It is a place where breaking down is not stopped, not controlled, and so it thrives.
So. Back to the real question. What does that mean for us? You and me?
There’s something about that miracle, something we don’t realize.
It’s not a miracle solely from God. It is a miracle that He allowed us to access, but it is us that must access it.
It is, in other words, our miracle. We, like wizards, have the ability to magically create order out of a universe so vast that it boggles our minds.
The problem, the tragedy, is that most of us have become so surrounded by this miracle that we don’t realize how fragile it is. That is the other side of the coin of a man-made miracle. It must continually be remade, continually built, continually worked-on, or it breaks apart.
A building will eventually fall if it is not maintained diligently. A city will erase itself if not maintained properly, defended properly, cared for properly. And we, ourselves, will dissolve into cynical anger, confusion, and despair, if we do not continually grow from the inside.
These words came from my heart today because I have felt, as I’ve grown, and as the world has gotten messier, and I’ve become disillusioned with a community I once wholeheartedly embraced, and recent events have caused once-old friendships to dissolve… I’ve felt the familiar, animalistic pull. The anger. The cynicism. The inner critic come to dance in the fields as my Godly soul weeps in the corner.
I’ve felt it, and I’ve lived it. And, in those moments, I am broken, I am utterly in despair.
Because I am like a man who once was a child, who saw a world with eyes where everything was built already, and had to suddenly face the chaos of it all.
And, bit by bit, I’ve had to remind myself: I have a choice.
I can go down the drain of chaos.
Or I can create a miracle.
I can look at the chaos, and acknowledge it. See it for what it is. This is what it means to mature.
But I can then understand I am a wizard, granted the strength and ability to turn chaos into order, despair into joy, darkness into light.
I can, in other words, build. Be a builder.
I see the rebels of the world, the friends of mine, and the world around, that have burned in their own ways by the hot coals of chaos. And I want to tell them that their cynicism and anger is justified, and true, and deserved.
But it is not a miracle. It is not divine. It is pain turned into a living thing.
I want to tell them that they can be miracles. That they can create order, truth, beauty. They can be wizards.
But then it becomes clear to me. The only way to do that is if I become one first.