Heart Soul Mind Strength

We do not even know their names. Three couples grew up with a radically different father and a mother who loved and supported the family in a society of grave depravity. These are the wives, not even named, who chose to marry and stick with this crazy family and its unpopular lifestyle. They had no idea that it was most fortuitous decision of their lives.

Everyone in the neighboring cities, the poor hard-working farmers, the hunters, the ranchers, the miners, the smelters, the carpenters, the inventers were subject to the mightier men who did not mind killing and torturing people. Men bragged about murder and about doing horrendous things to instill fear of them into the rest of the population. Men would build up a city with walls and fortifications and haughtily name the city after themselves.

Of all the cities, villages, and rural areas this family was the only family that held to a different principle. Although this family’s neighbors were consumed with amassing wealth and power without regard for morality, nor fear of God’s judgment for their selfish consumption that robbed and impoverished other people, their father (and father-in-law) and mother’s focus was to live aligned with the goodness of God.

It is likely that the three sons’ entire lives consisted of being trained by their father and mother to seek God’s ways and follow God’s directions, but the wives seemingly made a windfall of a choice. As God gave their father a huge assignment to complete, the young men, and later their wives, probably became integral to the process of carrying out the assignment. Who knows how many hours of their young lives they spent chopping down gopher wood trees, hewing planks, sourcing pitch, and erecting framing, siding, roof, window and door.

Then, at the right time, this little band of “weirdos” watched as representatives of all the animal kingdom progenitors approached in pairs or groups of seven on their own. They witnessed the hippopotamuses, the elephants, the giraffes, the dogs, the cats, the marsupials, the cattle, the deer-like, and birds of all kinds walk, rank and file into the open door of the Ark of safety without any people doing that unique part of the plan. They watched their father try to warn the neighbors and beckon them to safety, to no avail.

Then they entered all together. An unseen Hand closed the door. The world went dark. The days stretched to eons as the heavens opened up for the first time. Great underground water vaults erupted to the surface. They could only walk inside the Ark by hanging on to the sturdy framework of the Ark designed by God and built by them as the Ark left the stability of the ground and floated. The Ark had no rudder or steering mechanism. It would rise and fall on ever-growing swells of ocean. In the distance the family heard the deep crack as the first volcano rose up out of the sea floor. The scent of sulfur may have filled the air. The air inside the ark began to smell of ash and heat.

The days stretched on and on. The dark wooden box had seemed enormous while on land, but now seemed small in the endless water, completely alone on the planet. They felt cramped. Cooped up.

Finally, their father started sending out bird reconnaissance agents on a weekly basis. The advent of the olive branch provided some excitement, carried to them in the dove’s mouth. One day they were sitting in the Ark, alone and probably bored from waiting. The next day they finally stretched their legs and began to put together camp on dry land again. Starting with an altar at which to thank God and to establish a new way in this renovated world.

In place of the gentle slopes, babbling streams, and delightful little seas, the world they exited into contained mountains that filled the horizon and stretched up to the sky. It contained deep, deep oceans so vast and deep that they seemed endless and very frightening. The whole earth had less of a warming canopy layer with a high concentration life-giving oxygenated air. The nights were colder than the family had ever experienced, the days seemed more scorching.

All their neighbors, any acquaintances, the farmers, the merchants that once traded goods, were gone. Emptiness and stillness swallowed up the space where the thunderous crash of rain had been. These unnamed wives must have felt like they stepped out into a different world, but they had SO much work to do to make a habitable home alongside their brave, wise, and absolutely crazy husbands.

There are many unnamed people throughout history whose names or stories we may never learn, but God knows each of them by name. God took their willingness, their endurance through a completely unique event, and rebuilt the whole human race that exists today out of them. We talk about Noah and the sons all the time, but we would not exist without the nameless wives who endured through an event that literally changed the whole planet.