I never put it together until recently. If you’ve ever read the literary classic Frankenstein (as perhaps only weird homeschoolers are prone to do in their curriculums? No expectation if you haven’t haha), it’s the forlorn tale of an ambitious scientist, Victor Frankenstein. He attempts to manufacture new life in his lab and succeeds. The Monster he creates proves much less controllable or predictable than ole’ Victor apparently thought (or maybe he hadn’t thought at all about what might happen in minute two and onward). His creation ends up escaping, pillaging, ransacking, angsting, and causing all kinds of trouble and misery for all involved. I honestly don’t remember the end of the story, but the hazy flavors in my memory are generally downcast and dismal.

Why this came to mind some number of mornings ago while I was making coffee or something is a mystery. However, it did. And in that random musing, it occurred to me that perhaps Frankenstein was author Mary Shelley’s attempt at depicting how God might feel. He created something (us and our galactic home), set it spinning, gave it life – and it went so horribly haywire. It was flawed from the beginning. He didn’t anticipate its power or propensity. It arguably ruined His life, caused Him immeasurable consternation, and even caused the death of His family members (…Himself…? This is not a Holy Trinity post so we’ll leave that be).

This depiction honestly seems fitting and plausible. What does God think when He looks at us? At this world He made that we’ve done a great job of breaking? Is He aghast? Filled with regret? Furious? I think He has felt all of those things at times, at least if Biblical narratives and accounts can be believed.

I wonder, though, if there’s another way to look at it. If God is all-knowing (which I believe is true), He would have anticipated this entire narrative from before its beginning. He would have known what kind of costs He was incurring by turning on the lights and breathing life into the first humans on the board.

That to me seems, at once, a little more accurate and a lot more insane. We mortals take risks and make attempts but can’t predict the outcomes. We calculate; we project; we pray and leap and hope for the best. But we can’t enter one end of a tunnel of time knowing what the other end will have wrought by the time we reach it. God did. He initiated this celestial building project and this grand history knowing full well the cost and the outcomes He would experience because of it.

And yet He still did it. For some dastardly reason, He thought this whole thing was worth the trouble. That mystifies me. And makes me think that maybe He sees more in this profoundly broken, profoundly beautiful universe than we do.

-LS