Rough Draft

It all started at the dinner table over a conversation about the potato fish. If you haven’t heard of the potato fish, not to worry. Apparently there is no such thing. I didn’t know that when I asked, “What’s a potato fish?” The question was natural enough. We’d just finished our Miso soup, Chinese honey shrimp and brown rice when the subject of Jake’s unfinished science project came up. Sterling had been helping him with it earlier and was now suggesting that, in order to create a fish that demonstrated all the evolutionary developments of the fish in an anatomically correct manner, a potato would make a good main frame.

“Evolution?” I asked. “Your school allows you to ponder that possibility?” I told him that I have friends whose children attend private Christian schools where evolution is downplayed, even mocked, as nothing more than heresy. To which Sterling replied, “In the debate over evolution vs. creationism, all I know is that God created all that is. It doesn’t matter to me how he did it.”

That opened the floodgate on all kinds of theological ponderings, with a seventh grader and senior leading the way, with their parents and Nancy and me watching from the galley more than anything. We talked about predestination and Calvinism, about Roger Williams and about the omniscience of God. Holding one end of an unwrapped straw to his left eye while pointing down its length to illustrate, Sterling speculated that, while we mortals see time as a linear continuum, God is not so limited. Seeing from outside our limited perspective, God has something more like a three dimensional view of all time, seeing every second that ever was and ever will be as though all time is happening right now.

By this time, I was looking for a way to excuse myself from the table before I embarrassed myself and asked another question like, “What’s a potato fish?” That’s when Jake, the seventh grader, broke in. I’d said something about God’s intention to redeem all of his creation when Jake suggested, “Maybe, to God, we are all like a rough draft, the piece of paper he never throws away.”

Nancy and I looked at each other, our jaws dropping in amazement. I sat there humbled in the presence of such profound insight and grace perspective, already bearing hopeful fruit in the tender hearts and minds of another generation.

Rough drafts? The piece of paper God never throws away. A work in progress, all of our lives. We’re the ones who define ourselves by where we are on a continuum, in infancy, youth, middle and old age. We’re the ones who too soon write ourselves and others off as being too young or too old to do this or that. If these two young men represent the generation that will take the torch of kingdom leadership we are passing to them, then we need to get busy passing it faster. There is great, wonderful hope for the future with minds and hearts like that sitting at the table of communion.

In the meantime, since these two young men will be listening to my sermons, I’ll be putting in more time on the rough drafts of what I say. I’ll also be celebrating, with Jake and Sterling, that we are all works in progress as well as the pieces of paper God never, ever will throw away. We’ll walk humbly together in the presence of the creating and redeeming God as we watch the impact of God’s grace evolve all around us and in us. I’m not a finished work, no matter how old I am, but, indeed, a rough draft, the piece of paper God never will throw away.