Rob Bell - What We Talk About When We Talk About God

The enduring reality of the boat, then, is in the pattern, not the planks.

The planks come and go, but the pattern remains. You are a pattern, moving through time, constantly changing and yet precisely consistent. Some have said we’re like “light at the end of a spinning stick.”

The basic elements of life are actually quite common—hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and a few others. The dirt below us, the sky above us, the sun, moon, and stars, we’re all made of the same stuff.

You share over 60 percent of your genes with fruit flies, you share over 90 percent of your genes with mice, and you share 96 percent of your DNA with the large apes.

So when you read about aging singers or actors or politicians who used to be stars—well yes, of course they were . . . we all used to be stars.

One of my sons recently had a loose tooth that was driving him crazy. He’d sit at the table while we ate dinner, hand in his mouth, moving the tooth back and forth, trying to loosen it enough for it to come out. Day after day, talking about it and fussing with it and telling us just how badly he wanted it to come out. And then it came out—while we were at the beach. He started jumping up and down in the sand, celebrating, doing one of those dances that only an eleven-year-old boy can do, hoisting his now-removed tooth above his head, victorious.

He then turned to me and asked: If he threw it in the ocean, would he still get something from the tooth fairy? I said yes, feeling free to speak on behalf of the tooth fairy, who happened to be sitting next to me in a swimsuit.

And so he ran up to the waterline,

cocked his arm back,

and threw his tooth into the ocean.

I tell you this story because at some point today you will eat. You will eat for several reasons, chief among them being survival. If you don’t eat, you die, because your body needs food. And food comes from the Earth. It’s planted, watered, cultivated, exposed to the sun, and then harvested, transported, prepared, and placed on your plate. Between the sun and the rain and the nutrients in the soil, that food received what it needed to keep you alive.

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