One day, listening to a show on NPR, I learned of a fascinating study someone had done on how we make moral choices on a biological level.  They had done scans of the brain while asking morally ambiguous questions.  What they discovered was that it appeared the choice to choose one option over another wasn't a centrally located buzz of activity, but rather several locations battling it out for the correct choice. For instance, one zone would win over another in the choice between saving five people versus one.  But that same zone would lose the battle if that one person was your child.  It was as if every choice being made was a debate of options, even at the most fundamental level.  The conclusion was that there is no centrally located "judge" in our brains that does the choosing.  In fact, the more they study the brain, the more it seems like a collection of partial persons who somehow work together to form a single person greater than all of them.  We are Legion.

And as these things usually do, I began to wonder what this means and how it fits with what I believe about God.  And it was especially challenging this time because this idea of decentralized organization has shown itself to be amazingly efficient in all sorts of systems.  Planetary environments, biological bodies, economics, governments, the list goes on and on.  It has even been proposed that one argument against the existence of God is the simple fact that things left to themselves without management naturally seem to organize themselves in some fashion!  Even a pot of boiling water forms hexagonal columns of circulation.  Liquid hexagons!

But if God is the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, if he is the mover and Shaker of all things, why is our universe, even ourselves, arranged in such a way that precludes the necessity of Divine central control?  How is God's "eternal power" and "Divine nature" clearly seen through what had been made?

You know that feeling you get when you pull out yet another loop of tangled headphone wires and suddenly the whole knot comes lose, the wires falling straight and the loops opening up?  The separate voices in my head clamoring for the answer had finally reached a consensus.  And here is the conclusion they came to.

God's eternal power and his divine nature are summed up in his divine love.  His selfless, gracious, merciful love.  God himself is the source of all being and holds the universe together in his hand.  And yet, he seems to have done everything possible to create a universe and people that operate apart from him.  We can explain the things of nature without mentioning God.  We can make decisions for ourselves, for better or worse, without God.  In fact, unless you get down to the very basic philosophical questions about the source of our existence, God doesn't seem to be necessary. 

What kind of person writes himself out of the story?  A selflessly loving person, that's who.  Only selfless love is capable of creating another being capable of selflessly loving it back.  And a group of people, selflessly loving each other doesn't require a centralized organizer of that love.  As a young twiterpated couple doesn't need one of them to be superior to the other, as a brain doesn't need one lobe superior to the other, as a government doesn't need one branch superior to another, when selfless love is the foundation of all things, they organize themselves into something greater than themselves.  This is the Glory of God. 

In the end we realize that he didn't write himself out of the story after all.  As it happens, he is the story.  For he is Love.