meditatio at the water's edge

DEAD SEA SCROLLS - sounds historical, and perhaps boring. Well, here in Grand Rapids, Michigan there has been an exhibit of the scrolls for the past couple of months. This is the last weekend of the exhibit; we live in the only city it will visit before returning back home to Israel. I almost missed it... but my parents got us tickets to see it tonight.

Wandering through the exhibit, I was struck by a number of things. Our Christian faith, our incredible God... is incredible. These manuscripts are two thousand years old! But God knew we would find these piece of writing. While I have largely rejected the modern mindset of "proving the reality of God," and would rather think of faith as jus that, it is amazing to see these manuscipts as they tell about a God that was known by a people who lived before Christ walked this earth.

As I was about to leave the exhibit, Kathy pointed me toward one manuscript that she said I needed to see. It contains a word that was not spoken by the community of that day, it was a word that was too holy to be spoken; so it was always only written. The word translated: Yawah. And suddenly I felt like my fingers were only six inches away from the very writing of God.