In the BeginningWe hear this word a great deal-- the beginning of a meal, a day, a story, a date, a life, or a show, a game, a conversation, a journey and so on and on. The poets and philosophers even talk a lot about the beginning of the end. Sometimes it seems to me this word is so ubiquitous that I simply refuse to give it a second thought. In my cognition, things begin in a way and end in another. Nothing is more natural than this.What, however, is the precursor to the beginning? Allow me to be focused on myself first as I am more concerned about my own being. If my life starts with a cell since my parents decided to give me this current life (or maybe they did not), then my parents should be the beginning of my life. And then my grandparents on both sides, and my great grandparents whom I am pretty sure I have ever seen. The circle starts going backwards for one generation after another. I am getting dizzy now. Maths with spirals calculated backwards honestly is not my thing. Then ultimately the whole line of ‘my’ being traces to the very first people on this planet. I guess I should have stopped ‘beginning’ such an obnoxiousquestion because definitely my remote ancestors had the slightest idea of how one tiny of their descendants dared venture.How did the first people come into being? Well, renowned scientists have studied this matter for an awful lot of years searching for answers. To make it easier, just skip this controversial theory of humanity evolving from apes. It does not fancy me whatsoever to look into a hairy African gorilla’s eyes which seemingly tell me, “Good girl! You are an heir!”One thing for sure is this: before the very first peoples, the earth was.Hold on a second. Was my question “what is my beginning?”Now, somehow we are talking about how the earth began. Sounds preposterous? At least to myself! I never cared about the earth. All I knew about it was that it is not round, that it revolves around the sun, that life exists on it, that it is of 4.5 billion years age, and that it has a satellite. I wish I had studied more diligently in high school, yet that question of my origin never occurred to me. Asinine fatuity should be the comment I give to my previous being.This is getting serious. I do not know the answer -- probably it takes a couple of PhDs and lifelong searching to give a bold and yet not-even-close nice try. Let my little brain take one step a time. We are living in the Solar system -- somehow the Sun has to arrive on the scene. The Sun is 4.6 billion years, slightly older than our Earth in astronomical sense. Not a coincidence, actually. But the Milky Way where our home is is much older -- 13.5 billion years. That sounds reasonably right. The barred spiral Milky Way, a sweet galactic home to our Sun, is about 100,000 light-year across and has been constantly rotating. More to the point, it contains over 200 billion stars, half of which are older than the 4.6-billion-year-old Sun. Galaxies like ours typically undergo a stellar baby boom, still churning out stars in enormous quantities.If only the question could be answered here! When I tried to dive more deeply, I found there is no way to know it at all. The attempt to find out the sheer number of the collections of galaxies that populate the universe beyond the Milky Way gave me a legion of goose bumps -- counting them in any imaginable human ways with however advanced technologies is simply impossible. 200 billion is still a figure astronomers underestimated 10 times more at least and who knows how further it can go!I am totally a layman, and really, I need to take a breath. My head spins. No need to throw myself into the gigantically immense darkness of the outer space to find my origin. The answer, probably lies somewhere within. Anyhow, I am waiting for a revelation.Here it is.I have read it a coupe of times without thinking whatsoever. Many a time, if I do not pay attention, I end up knowing nothing about anything. My eyes were blind, and my heart was darkened. When the word “beginning”once again flickered my eyes, the whole world lit up! The then making-no-sense words suddenly came to life! It says in black and white:IN THE BEGINNING, GOD CREATED THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH.That IS it! For all the time I spent on searching for answers, even when I read this verse I could not see. The very beginning of everything, that is, before the heavens and earth, the oceans and creatures, the plants and birds, the man and the woman. That is categorically everything before time and space. God was there. In the very beginning. In the very beginning.Without eyes, I could not see. Without God, I could not be. Without faith, there is no beginning.In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.--Genesis 1:119. Which of the following can replace the underlined word “obnoxious？”