Judges 19:16 And behold, an old man was coming from his work in the field at evening. The man was from the hill country of Ephraim, and he was sojourning in Gibeah. The men of the place were Benjaminites. 17 And he lifted up his eyes and saw the traveler in the open square of the city. And the old man said, “Where are you going? And where do you come from?” http://esv.to/Judg19.16-17

While traveling in Peru I purchased a puzzle of Machu Picchu at a bookstore. I asked the clerk how to say puzzle in Spanish. She pointed to the side of the box where it said “Rompecabeza”. Roughly translated, this means something to the effect of “jumbled up head”. She went on to explain, “it’s your job, in your head, to piece it back together”.

When I was young, I loved puzzles and board games. We had a series of puzzles that all came from the same puzzle manufacturer, and therefore the same jigsaw. When my friends and I discovered this, we had all sorts of fun taking puzzles with pictures named “Country Road” and “Liberty Bell”, swapping the pieces, and making new unique combinations such as “Country Bell” and “Liberty Road”.

A few years ago, puzzles returned to my life when they were re-introduced as a workroom break activity from long stretches at the computer. Enter the National Park puzzle series, and a bunch of clever geologists. We knew about the swapping pieces thing and therefore could take Hawaiian National Park and The Grand Canyon and make something resembling a sedimentary canyon with volcanic lava flowing from it, an unlikely combination, but great fun.

Studying geology is like working on a jigsaw puzzle without the picture on the lid. Many of the critical pieces are missing. There might be pieces in the box that came from another puzzle. It’s interesting but not always easy, to put together a cohesive picture. There’s the truth, and there’s the picture we piece together. Earth detectives seek the truth, and having a picture helps, even when its not entirely right.

So this all leads me to a part of geology I think of as putting all the pieces back in the right box. Its called “provenance” and its basically unraveling the story from the sediments or rock samples back to the origins of the rock. Its like asking the rock, “where do you come from”? This is used especially with sedimentary systems where pieces of the rocks broke off and traveled long distances. Glaciers, streams, landslides, wind and waves are all good at picking things up and moving them to new places. Its the geologist’s job to piece this story back together.

There are clues to this unraveling process. If a rock is round and smooth it has probably travelled a long distance and been winnowed at the edges along the way., bouncing off other rocks. If a rock is jagged, it’s probably closer to its origin or composed of a more resistant material. Bigger rocks in general, have not had as long a journey as the smaller ones. An exception are boulders known as glacial erratics. The glacier picked them up and moved them long distances, free of charge. Like sedimentary hitchhikers, these show up in unlikely places. Some rocks have been winnowed down to sand, silt, or clay grains. These need to be examined under microscopes or through isotope analysis to figure out where they are from. Every rock fragment is different, and every story is a complex puzzle, a “Rompecabeza”.

There is a fate part of the rock record that is undeniable. It seems simultaneously random yet ordered. It is not a stretch for me to think about provenance and its relation to an entirely different word: God’s Providence . I see provenance as answering the question, “Where do you come from?” I see Providence as owning the future, the “Where are you going?” part. I see fate as the line connecting the answers to those questions, which basically gives each individual a unique trajectory. When our trajectories cross, it’s either serendipity, or some Presbyterians may consider it God’s Will, Pre-ordained, Predestination.

I look at at the people who have made a difference in my life and think of the events that led us to encounter each other. Our answers to the provenance question would all be different. Our answers to the Providence question may be the same, or different. At some point, we land on the same beach, puzzle pieces in the same box.  We were shaped by the elements and the paths that brought us there. We shape each other and some move on. We land randomly like pebbles, yet simultaneously like pieces of a bigger picture, all colors, shapes, sizes, and destinies. The picture is temporal, beautiful, and unique.  There is something bigger than all of us, sorting the pieces and making sure the picture turns out as beautifully as it was intended.  The Master, The Artist, The cosmic Geologist,  all notions of a Supreme Being, working on putting us back together again.

(lwr, 10/10/2017)