Who Made Us—Made Me?

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

I must have been ten or eleven. Certainly young enough still to be learning to write legible longhand. All four of us were in the family car, heading to a budget department store or maybe (less likely) a restaurant. Looking back now, I’d guess my attention was elsewhere, thinking about homework or a girl in my class I liked, but my ears pricked when my brother, seven years my elder, said something he had just heard about a person’s handwriting. Who knows if it was true or not, but he had my instant attention.

“If you make your capital ‘I’ with two horizontal strokes top and bottom,” he said, “it shows self-confidence.”

I thought a second.

“I do that,” I said.

No response from Kevin or Mom and Dad.

“I do my Is that way,” I said again, wanting to do more than share my writing habits, but show something about my childlike, emerging self, my own budding confidence.

I’m sure I got some response from the fam and we went on to other topics, or maybe we pulled into the parking lot and piled out.

I’ve been thinking recently about that conversation, about how even then I was coming to terms with who I was, who I would be.

What does it mean to be a person? Or, as we would say as kids, to be “Me, myself, and I”? (An actual song title, Google just informed me, from the likes of Billie Holiday to Beyoncé.)

What makes me me? How can I be not only a person who makes choices and forges an identity, but also someone aware (and therefore grateful) for having been brought to life by forces before and beyond me? I wasn’t on hand when Mom and Dad decided, after Mom’s miscarrying a longed-for daughter, that they might try to conceive again. I owe who I’ve become to conversations and realities that I cannot recall, much less orchestrate.

Sometimes I worry that I’ve become immune to the immense and humbling truth: We are made: “Something is done to us or for us before we do anything,” writes Eugene Peterson in Traveling Light. In a cultural moment that sometimes fetishizes freedom and self-determination, I’m more aware of the value of what Marilynne Robinson calls the givenness of things. The givINGness of Divine Providence.

And while growing up I heard plenty in Sunday school classes in my California suburban church about God’s having made the world and all humankind, it’s only lately that I’ve interrogated the Bible origin stories to understand what it might mean that God created me.

It seems odd to me now that I’ve never really bored down on this. I’ve assumed my createdness. Not mined it. And in some ways, this kind of self-exploration seems, I know, on the surface childishly simple. But is it? “I think the biggest challenge now,” the powerhouse intellect Rowan Williams wrote about our contemporary mindset, “is not about Christianity, religion or spirituality. It is in the deeply individualist approach which assumes that I am responsible for creating my being moment by moment.”

Well, thank goodness I’m saved from that continual burden. I do not, as one self-help book subtitle put it, create my life from the inside out. There’s more to personhood than my own pitiable efforts. As Eugene Peterson puts it, “We wake up each morning to a world we did not make.”

And we can look at ourselves with a tinge of awe because we are created. And not just through some pile-up of biological goings-on in the world. No, a Being of intelligence and kindness wanted us, fashioned us.

“Before the universe is even mentioned,” Michael Lloyd writes in Café Theology about the book of Genesis, “the Bible has already introduced us to a Person.” This God spoke into existence roiling waters, flourishing forests, teeming herds. This God delighted in creativity and abundance. “Let there be,” God said time after time he made something. But things get even more interesting when God makes humankind. Let there be shifts to Let us make--the tone more purposeful, personal. As though now—making us—is when God truly gets invested.

And behind this eruption of creation’s extravagances, we see how God in God’s own being did all this making out of a life of communal familial intimacy. Let us make, we hear. We call God not only Creator but also Father. Even the Son, Scripture tells us, helped make all that is—and us. No less than the Trinity was at work. Out of the overflow of God’s trinitarian love and generosity, God was eager to bring us into being. And God did not pull away once the making was done, but communed with us, still keeping us near.

So is it true, O God of triune richness, that you not only made the world but through your invisible hands also created me? How can I overlook or undervalue your handiwork, O God, if I consider how you brought my very being into the world? And more: Did you not just distractedly think about me, but as the Psalm puts it, knit me lovingly together in my mother’s womb? And turn to my then-germinating soul and now-unfolding life a loving gaze?