the life of an atom

Do you ever look around and just think ‘Wow!’? I mean, do you ever check out how your skin heals or how your eyes work, or how your hair grows, or how your heart just keeps beating without you even thinking about it and have a moment where it just blows your mind? Do you ever see a great play in football where one player shoots as another tackles as the keeper dives and just think about how many mental and physical processes each player needs to go through to make that moment happen and wonder how it can happen so easily? Do you ever watch somebody die on a movie or in real life and wonder what makes that person alive or dead? What actually happens and what is that like? Do you ever think about how incredible it is that we can think these questions when no other species seems to be able to?
It seems that pretty much every month we have a different scientist telling us something new with complete confidence and assurance. One month we hear that alcohol is bad for us and the reason so many people are depressed, but the next month we hear with just as much confidence and assurance that alcohol is good for us and helps avoid heart disease. Now I’m not criticizing scientists, far from it; science and the desire to know more and understand more and harness creation to promote our own survival is part of the miracle of who we are, and science reveals the amazing intelligence behind creation which confirms to me with increasing conviction that God is intimately and intricately involved with creation and that He actually did a really good job. Can anyone truly look at DNA and imagine that something more advanced than our most advanced computer system just happened by chance? But this is not, in my opinion, the biggest mystery that presents itself to the scientists. No I believe that accolade goes to the atom.
You might think ‘but we know so much about the atom, we even know how to split it and how it is made up and we learn all about it in school’ but this is not where the mystery of the atom lies. No the mystery of the atom lies in us.
Each one of us is made up of trillions of atoms which hold together to make us for the duration of our lives, but the mystery is that even though these atoms choose to be us, they are not aware of us at all. That is because they are not actually alive. Of all the trillions of atoms that make us, not one of them is alive! Yet we are alive. This is the miracle of life. For some reason that we are completely unaware of, these atoms choose to be us for the duration of our lives and then stop, decompose and go to make up other things. And more disconcerting is that the atoms are exactly the same when we are alive and when we are dead, so what is it that makes us alive? These atoms that make us are the same atoms that make everything else in the world and for that matter, in the universe, and that just deepens the mystery. Why do these atoms that so compliantly make us and all the other living things on this planet choose to do so when similar atoms so stubbornly refuse to do so anywhere else? What is it that keeps these atoms together and then moves them on to be other things?
It might surprise you that the answers lie in the Bible. In Colossians 1 we read

15-18We look at this Son and see the God who cannot be seen. We look at this Son and see God's original purpose in everything created. For everything, absolutely everything, above and below, visible and invisible, rank after rank after rank of angels—everything got started in him and finds its purpose in him. He was there before any of it came into existence and holds it all together right up to this moment. And when it comes to the church, he organizes and holds it together, like a head does a body.
18-20He was supreme in the beginning and—leading the resurrection parade—he is supreme in the end. From beginning to end he's there, towering far above everything, everyone. So spacious is he, so roomy, that everything of God finds its proper place in him without crowding. Not only that, but all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe—people and things, animals and atoms—get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the cross.
You see it says that everything is held together in Christ. All things – that includes you and me and atoms and planets, everything – and also that we find our purpose in Him. You see we are not just a random collection of atoms that came together by chance and after a few hundred thousand hours (if we’re lucky) cease to be us and go of to be something else. We are not just part of some evolutionary process which means that we get to breathe and live for a few decades before we stop breathing and fade away. No, we are actually created by God and our lives have a purpose, and when we come into connection and relationship with God, the God who created us, then we actually get to live. We come into contact with what life is suppose to be like. You see Life is not just some biological, physical process but there is actually a spiritual dimension to it too. That’s why we are not the same when we are alive and dead even though atomically speaking we are. And we get a further clue to what this life is about from Jesus himself when he says

“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me.

When we come into contact with Jesus we come into contact with life. And vice versa, when we fully enter into life, we come into connection with who Jesus is. You see life is this incredible gift, something that is invigorating, thrilling and awesome, and yet we just take it for granted and drift through it coming nowhere near our potential, but Jesus says that we can live life radically, extremely, completely, through Him, because He isn’t just involved in it, he IS life, he is truth, he is hope, he is love, and through Him we come into connection with how things are suppose to be and how things are.
It’s all about harmony, God who created it all and dreamed the whole thing up is the same God who holds it all together, so we are created to live in harmony with Him. The problem is that rather than serve God and live in harmony with Him, we put our own interest and selfishness first and serve our own purposes and so live in disharmony, which brings about brokenness, hurt, pain, disease, death, destruction, anger, frustration and fear, and not just in ourselves but on a global level. (Isn’t it ironic that these atoms which God holds together to make us and everything else, are the same atoms that we split in nuclear weapons to bring about death and destruction on a global scale). It seems we have a choice; to live in harmony with the creator of all things and bring about hope truth love and life, or to continue in disharmony andbring about death, disease, destruction, brokenness and pain.
Back in Colossians it says that God is in the process of putting all things back together, and that includes us if we let Him. The question is, will you let Him?