The Missing Persons of Noah's Ark

 

 

Have you ever been saved from doing or saying something stupid? Have you ever stopped yourself from doing something really dumb?

 

“Where are the people with Noah’s Ark?” I asked.

 

“I don’t know,” Vickie replied.

 

We both looked through the room in which the Ark was displayed but could not find the wooden figures of Noah, his family, and the two-by-two set of animals. We had seen the two small daughters of our friends playing with the figurines, where could they have put them?

 

Prior to our friends coming for dinner, Noah and company had been in their usual place, on a shelf outside the Ark in our sunroom; the same place they had occupied for years. Now they were gone.

 

Surely the girls did not take them home with them. Surely not.

 

We looked in the living room, which was adjacent to the sunroom, no Noah.

 

We looked in the office adjacent to the living room, no Noah.

 

We looked in the hallway adjacent to the living room,  no animals.

 

We looked in the bedroom off the hallway, no figurines.

 

We looked all over the sunroom again, we looked in cabinets, pulled drawers open, looked under furniture – no Noah, no Mrs. Noah, no two-by-two animals.

 

What to do?

 

Should we call our friends and ask them to ask their girls if they know where Noah and the animals are?

 

Surely not.

 

What to do?

 

Have you ever been saved from doing or saying something stupid? Have you ever stopped yourself from doing something really dumb?

 

We knew that calling our friends would not be the best thing to do.

 

When you are accustomed to seeing something in a certain place and then it’s gone, it can feel strange – the place is suddenly empty. The Ark looked isolated, alone, abandoned. No Noah, no Mrs. Noah, no animals standing two-by-two. No elephants, no giraffes, no cows, no hippos.

 

“If they don’t turn up, maybe we can find replacements,” I said.

 

I am, as many of you know, not the brightest. Sometimes it takes a while for me to catch on, and when I do catch on it isn’t so much that I’ve figured it out, but rather the result of perseverance, of turning all the pieces of the puzzle over and trying each one to see what fits.

 

An hour or two after our search for the missing people a thought mercifully came to me, an impulse more than a thought. I went into the sunroom and over to the Ark. I lifted the roof of the Ark and looked inside…and there were the missing persons with their animals.

 

When the girls had finished playing with the figurines, they put them where they belonged – not outside the Ark, but inside it.

 

What might we learn from this?

 

For sure this is a reminder of how children can teach us if we will only pay attention to them. They can convict us, challenge us, encourage us, and call us back to the simplicity, awe, and wonder that God created us to enjoy. Chesterton wrote that all he really needed to know, he learned in the nursery – as a child. Right and wrong, good and evil, grandeur, the numinous, love and kindness, our high calling, joy, love. 

The world of adults educates the image of God out of us, it is an olive press – crushing the life out of us, forming us into the image of things, power, pleasure, making idolaters of us – whether we are “Christian” or non-Christian.

 

Finding Noah within the Ark is also a reminder that “we have died and our lives are hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3). We belong to Jesus and we live in Him, we can’t really see who we are, not really. On the one hand we couldn’t stand to see sin and our hearts outside of Christ as they truly are, on the other hand the glory which God has placed within us in Christ is reserved for the fulness of eternity – when all things are made new; this is a glory that will take our breath away. 

As Lewis wrote, if we could see the true nature of the person beside us, we would be tempted to fall down and worship the person as a god – so great is the glory which our Father has placed within us in Christ.

 

Why do we treat each other so poorly?

 

If we wouldn’t (let us hope) desecrate Leonardo’s Mona Lisa or Michelangelo’s David, why do we desecrate the image of God both in ourselves and in others?

 

Another thing we can learn is hiding in plain sight, do you see it?

 

People belong in the Ark, but we can be so accustomed to seeing them outside the Ark that we think nothing of it, in fact, we expect to see them outside the Ark.  Whether our family, our neighbors, our coworkers, fellow students, partners in civic endeavors; we can become so used to seeing them outside the Ark that we think nothing of it.

 

Jesus commands us to “make disciples.” This goes beyond talking about church, it goes beyond sharing our thoughts about right and wrong, it is far beyond mentioning God now and then, and it even goes beyond talking about Jesus…as vital as that is. To make disciples requires engagement, commitment, and service.

 

To make disciples requires that we bring people into the Ark; the door must be open, the welcome ramp must be extended, and we must both invite and guide. Our Father is the God of hospitality and we ought to be the most hospitable people on earth. Our destiny is the Marriage Supper of the Lamb – let there be no empty places at the Table.

 

There was once a highly successful family-owned regional grocery store chain based in Richmond, VA named Ukrops. Ukrops was a national leader in terms of market share in their highly competitive industry. Eventually the family sold the business to a large company that assimilated it into their multi-state grocery business. 

The new corporate owner promptly destroyed the level of service and profitability of the stores it purchased; it was a textbook example of how to take the best and make it the worst. For those of us who enjoyed the Ukrops experience, it was disgusting. The new owners so damaged their reputation in Richmond that they had to either close or sell the stores and leave the market.

 

If you were in a Ukrops store and asked an employee where you could find an item, the employee would not tell you where the item was, he would not give you directions to the item, instead he or she would escort you to the item, even if it was on the other side of the store. That was but one difference between Ukrops and its competitors – personal service, personal touch, personal care.

 

We invite and guide by serving and loving, by asking and listening and praying, by affirming our Father’s love and care and His desire for deep relationship, by being the Presence of Jesus Christ, by portraying hope. We encourage others to shop for healthy foods, not food with additives of sin and spiritual and moral poison in them. 

We point out the difference between food and drink which nourish, and that which deadens the senses and makes us less than who our Father created us to be. We do not lead people into a diet with cancer-causing agents, but rather to eat the Bread of Life which is Jesus Christ.

 

Are there people in my life outside the Ark? Have I grown so used to seeing them outside the Ark that I no longer think about them as being outside rather than inside? Does it no longer bother me that should (or when!) the Flood come that they will perish?

 

What about you?