Years ago at the Stetson University Pastor’s School, the great Biblical Scholar Walter Brueggemann  gave a wonderful lecture about God and God’s creation. His main point was that the world God created is an incredibly miraculous thing that is well-able to live on and sustain itself without our needing to be in control of it. And his message was that you and I need to learn to let go of life a little bit, and trust God to make it work for us.

And so Walter Bruggemann re-told the Genesis story in a neat way. Just like you and me when we build something with our own hands, Walter said, God got very excited at the close of the sixth day of creation when everything was ready to go. In six wonderful steps, God had put together everything needed for creation to thrive and prosper – the rotation on the planets was just right, the placement of the galaxies right where they needed to be, the heat and cold were in perfect balance, the chemical compounds were just as they should be, and all living things were ordered in such a way that life was even able to reproduce itself! And now that everything was finished, the time had come for God to set creation spinning…

… to see if the whole cosmos would hold together and work the way God intended it to…

… to step back and LET IT GO!

So on the seventh day, God rested.

God let go.

God stood back and watched.

Would this delicately balanced and intricately shaped world of creation that God made be able to hold together, nurturing and sustaining itself?

As Brueggemann asked that question, he paused for a long moment. Those of us who thought we need to be the General Managers of the Universe felt a bit convicted of our sin as we imagined God stepping back and letting go to see if creation would work on its own.

And in the middle of that long dramatic “letting go” pause something funny happened.

A cell phone rang!

Some one of us in the audience was getting a call!

And now, with God Himself having stepped back and let go to see if the world would work without God micro-managing it, the question in that lecture hall became:

Could the person in the audience whose phone was ringing avoid the urge to believe that life could not possibly go on if he didn’t answer that call right then?

Well, in that moment of almost embarrassing silence, with every eye scouring the room to see whose phone it was, the man sitting NEXT to me reached into his pocket, pulled out the ringing cell phone, put it to his ear – and as 300 people watched – sheepishly said, “Hello?”

Many of us find it difficult to let go of life for even a moment.

And yet that is where true faith begins.