God saw that the light was good. . . .

— Genesis 1:4

Sometimes we need to slow down and ask good questions. Genesis 1 starts by showing that God’s creative work takes place in the deepest darkness that people could imagine. That reality invites us to wonder, “What would God do first to overcome the darkness? How would God fill the emptiness that existed before he began to create?”

The rest of Genesis 1 answers those questions, and it starts with God’s first creative act: creating light in the midst of the darkness. The sun, moon, and stars will come later in the creation story. But at this point God simply creates light and then calls the light good! There is something incredibly beautiful about this creative act. The first act of creation sets the stage for everything that will follow in the rest of the Bible’s story: God is the one who makes something out of nothing. God is the one who creates light.

The Bible presents God as the one who pushed back the darkness with this first light. In a way, that’s what the first week of Advent is about. As we anticipate celebrating Jesus’ birth, we wait in hope for God to create something new in us, to bring light into the darkest circumstances of our lives.

God, help us to see and believe that you can make something new, even in the darkest spaces of our histories and into our current circumstances.