My daughter and I were digging up potatoes in the garden late in September. Most of the potatoes were pretty small, but we try to be sure we do not waste anything so all of them were going in the bucket. Suddenly I heard, "Yuk, this isn't a potato" and she reared back to pitch a tulip bulb she had dug up into the compost pile. I stopped her and said, "Hey, we want to plant that in the flower bed and it will be beautiful by spring." She looked at the dirty, shabby tulip bulb and said, "How can anything as pretty as a tulip come out of something as ugly, old, and beat up as this?"

The fact of the matter is that it is a basic design of the Creator that causes all kinds of beauty and new life to come from an old source that has been buried. These beautiful flowers all were dead-looking ugly bulbs at one time. It is a design of nature that allows seeds to come out of a dying and rotten vegetable.

What is interesting is that the same thing is true on a spiritual, psychological, and emotional level. A beautiful Christian life is only possible when the ugly old person of sin is buried. Those of us who have found ourselves deep in sin, fight a losing battle if we try to overcome that sin on our own. It is only when we bury that sinful, ugly old person that something beautiful can blossom and grow. That is why baptism is such a wonderful, beautiful act. Perhaps those who have grown up in church cannot appreciate it as much as those of us who experienced total contamination by the world, but it is far from a meaningless or senseless act to us.

All God tells us to do is logical, reasonable, and pregnant with meaning. Let us bury the old man of sin, come out of the waters of baptism a new person in a new relationship with God, and with a new capacity to change the world through the power God gives us.

--John N. Clayton

Back to Contents Does God Exist?, MayJun06.