A Voice in the Stairwell

On August 14, 2003, Maria Gonzalez was climbing the stairs to her fourteenth-floor apartment in the Bronx when every light in the building went dark. Fifty million people across the northeastern United States lost power in an instant. The stairwell became absolute — no emergency lights, no glow from under doorways, nothing. She could not see her own hand in front of her face.

That is the closest most of us will ever come to "formless and void." Genesis tells us the earth was without shape, wrapped in darkness, the deep stretching out in every direction like a stairwell with no walls, no railing, no landing. Nothing to hold onto. Nothing to see.

But notice what Scripture says next: "The Spirit of God was hovering over the waters." Before a single photon of light existed, God was already there — present, attentive, brooding over the chaos the way a mother bird warms eggs she cannot yet see.

And then He spoke. Not a shout. Not a struggle. A word: "Let there be light." And light was.