In the Beginning Gen 1:1

Genesis 1:1-5 (NLT)
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
בְּרֵאשִׁית ׀ בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים ׀ אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ׃

When I was about 10 years old, my best friend and I were out riding our bikes. This would have been 1989, and that alone should tell you what kind of adventure this was. Mid-summer, South Texas heat, short shorts, and flip-flops on a hand-me-down BMX bike.

I had no BMX skills, just the equipment. The most adventurous things my pegs had ever been involved in were carrying Trey, the best friend, when his bike was out of commission. On this day, we were doing laps in the neighborhood, seeing who was out and who may have some fresh Kool-Aid on offer. Talking about 10-year-old boy things and making lazy arcs from one side of the street to the other.

The crash was a sight to see. Trey was talking to me and making a deep loop around me at the same time. As he came along my left side, he sped up but didn’t look ahead. His head turned to me, not even a hint of what was coming. He plowed headlong into the back of a big ole conversion van.

You may not know what a conversion van is if you are a younger reader. My description cannot do it justice, so please give it a quick Google. Suffice it to say that it was an immovable object with a prominent ladder hanging off the back of it. Trey found a rung with his forehead while his chest got up close and personal with his handlebars. I will not tell you of the rest of the impact points.

He bounced off the thing like they were both made of rubber, and the pile of twisted limbs and cockeyed bike parts was cartoonish, and I couldn’t help but laugh. I swear there was genuine concern under the laugh, but Trey may not have caught the subtlety.

When I got to him and pulled him free of the wreckage, he was not breathing. Do not be alarmed; he wasn’t dead; he just had the wind knocked out of him. The kind of thing we used to shrug off as kids that, if it happened to us now, we would be in the ER and laid up for a few weeks of convalescence.

Trey had the timeless look of a boy who knows his breath will return; it always has before, but the anticipation of its arrival borders on doubt.

There is not much you can do for a friend in this situation. You mostly stare at them unhelpfully and occasionally remind them to breathe as if forgetting is the problem.

It is this image that comes to mind when I think of Genesis 1:1. My friend Trey, face full of eagerness, a tinge of anxiety, a lot of determination, and a touch of fear. It is, admittedly, my interpretation of the moment before creation begins, but I believe there is evidence to back me up.

I think most of us imagine creation as a stately progression of enormous objects. And yet if we have discovered anything about the nature of the universe, it is that there is very little of it that is stately or calm. Our sun is a raging inferno of destruction, a clock winding down to an inevitable end. And the dying of that star gifts life to Earth.

When I attempt to imagine the beginning, the real one that this is a poetic image of, I imagine fire and force, chaos submitting to order, God using word to master matter and forge from it a paradise in which to invest a part of Himself.

The breath you draw in before that kind of endeavor would be the electric kind. Oxygen to fuel the fire of the forge.

The first word of the Hebrew Bible is בְּרֵאשִׁית (Bereshit)—“In the beginning.” But ancient rabbinic tradition doesn’t start with what is said. It starts with what is not.

The first letter of the Hebrew Scriptures is bet (ב), not aleph (א)—and that silence is no accident.

According to the Midrash Rabbah, the letter aleph, though first in the Hebrew alphabet, was passed over as the starting letter of the Torah. It represents the unspeakable, the silent breath, the unvoiced potential that precedes all sound. Bet, by contrast, is voiced—it opens outward, like a container, a house (bayit), or a womb.

The rabbis taught that the Torah begins with bet because the true beginning of creation—what comes before “In the beginning”—was a silence so full it could not be written.
A pause.
A breath drawn inward by God.
A waiting.

In this telling, the world is born not first by speech, but by listening.

Creation begins not with “Let there be…”
But with a hush so deep it holds the words to come.

My friend Trey, lying there on the hot pavement, waiting for the moment his breath would return.

It took time, not that long for me, ages for him. And then the solar plexus let go and in swept a giant gulp of air. An inhalation that felt as long as the wait for it. Life flooded his reddened cheeks, tears filled his eyes at the sensation of life inrushing before outrushing again.

Then, finally, he breathed out. It was a laugh mixed with a sob, just one or two. The joy of life rushing over the top of the fear of death and producing the elation that only comes on the heels of hard times.

This is how I see 1:1 playing out. Bet opens the curtains on our grand story. The inhale of deep anticipation before the exhale of furious, dangerous creation. Forces beyond our imagining being brought to heel by a God who makes it look easy.

This is the beginning of the story and everything that comes after carries the same wild energy and wonder. What would life look like for us if we embraced it? If instead of getting lost in the mundane shuffle of life, we filed our lungs with air and prepared a place for the Aleph, the wild beginning, to take root.

This is not a measure of your job’s excitement, your marriage’s passion, nor the enthusiasm with which you attack your hobbies. This is a changing of the lens through which you see your life. God did not create a wild and wonderful universe so that we could hole up in a cubicle and creep towards death and eternity.

He has made you fearfully and wonderfully, He has breathed life into humanity with the same reverence and passion He used to infuse the universe. So, let us find the thread of it. Let us light that torch again. Inhale with God and exhale new creation.