Solutions October 2019 | Page 24

there too.”
This, of course, is not the origin of life.
A beginning has already been made.
And we ourselves had a beginning
that precedes any self-awareness of
beginning—we were conceived and
born and experienced many wonderful
things (and some not so wonderful)
that were formative for us but that we
will never remember.
But there is a point at which we
become self-aware, conscious, and
awake to the world and realize that
we are actors and creators and have
something to say about our lives
and something to do that might be
significant. Life is not simply being
done to us, but we have an agency and
we ourselves are alive and matter. It
is the time that, in the language of the
church, we discover we have not only
a body and mind but also a soul. And
the soul is full of energy and bursting
with curiosity and adventure—we are
ready to really live now.
this moment of waking up to life.
She wrote of the surprise of finding
yourself awake in a world of insects
and rocks and parents and friends—
and then the bewilderment of getting
in your own way and finding that you
are stumbling all over yourself in this
wonderful world and wondering where
to make a good start.
The Christian answer to this
experience is baptism. Baptism is
where we make a good start. For this
is where Jesus made a good start.
Excerpted from A Month of Sundays by Eugene H.
Peterson Copyright © 2019 by Eugene H. Peterson.
Published by WaterBrook, an imprint of Random
House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, on
November 5, 2019.
Annie Dillard wrote a wonderful book
titled An American Childhood about
Eugene H. Peterson
24 • Solutions
Eugene H. Peterson, translator of The Message: The
Bible in Contemporary Language, was the beloved
author of more than thirty books, including A Long
Obedience in the Same Direction, Run with the Horses,
Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, and Tell It Slant. He
earned his master’s degree in Semitic languages from
Johns Hopkins University. Peterson was the founding
pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air,
Maryland, where he and his wife, Jan, served for twenty-
nine years. Peterson held the title of professor emeritus
of spiritual theology at Regent College, Vancouver,
British Columbia, from 1998 until his death in 2018.