We crept into the woods at night, the lights of our college’s nature preserve dormitory fading to simple pinpricks the deeper we ventured in. We were hunting for owls. It was a weekend-long geology expedition, but our professor said the grounds of the preserve were replete with owls in mid-October. So, we tightened our jackets around our bodies, flashlights in hand, and followed him up the wooded trail, our beams of light darting in the dark.
The professor held aloft an iPod with a small speaker stuck in the headphone jack, which emitted the sounds of the eastern screech and barn owls. The volume was cranked all the way up, but we could barely hear the synthetic hoots and swooshes. Neither, we imagined, could the owls. We stood shoulder to shoulder in a pack while the muted cries drifted into the night air, our flashlights pointed to the ground.
There was not much to think about while waiting for the appearance of one of the fabled owls. Instead of merely staring at the withered bush next to me on the path, I thought of the God I did not believe in, not yet, at least. The geology course had made me wonder about creation, made it more real to me. I saw the intricacies of the bands of fossils, the incredible force that different minerals exuded against each other, and wondered whether glaciers and canyons and end moraines and rock formations were not formed by accident, but through careful artistry, using water and pressure and time as tools the way a sculptor uses chisels and hammers.
I saw the night around us as a shadow of the time when the earth was without form and void, the cold and the damp transporting me to when there was nothing but God, who was preparing to blast the darkness apart with the command for light, when the emptiness would shatter and all that He’d imagined would burst into being.