What existed in God’s red eye before the naming of time? An early map of your mother’s womb, the place of your home where he would begin to shape you. This fiery and eccentric Creator, before even touching the elements into being, had visions of each curve of your body, watched each supple piece of flesh compose, fold and unfold from mere mathematical, nearly invisible strands of life. He designed the exact folds of this shelter where your body would begin to form. Each synapse of your brain would dance the tango in His visions. How you would later frame your thoughts into poems about the pines holding their limbs against heavy winter winds, how exactly your emotions toward children would grow to make you want one of your own: He laughed as he reached His hands out before Him, carved the air and watched you come alive.

There would be passion and hurting. And He would feel deeply both; He would allow His heart to feel the full emotion of this awful thing. Even your name—He would whisper this in your mother’s ear at the precise time. Not even awkward playschool children could take away the full enjoyment He felt when your name first rolled over His eternal tongue. He would be stirred from his seat, on the edge of His seat, watching as the delivery of all His millennia of knowing you would come into focus. He still dances back and forth over the film of your life, not a moment wasted in His memory.

"What a person I have made this time!" He once shouted to the angels hemming around his chambers. "Please, come see. So much like Me. Look at how he forms his own names in the quiet morning on the path up the mountain. Look at how she loves how her paint slurs over the rough canvas." Here and there the angels are dispatched to give his daughter a little extra time and canvas. He Himself will come beside his son and marvel with him at the things they will name together. His hand goes out to his son’s—remembering that day when he walked side by side in that garden-place laced with apples, stopping to chat under the willow trees. Running their smooth hands together over the lion’s fur. His heart flutters and reminisces over the unbroken way they talked and the gifts the daughter brought to Him in the dripping moonlight. Across the meadow she would come, dancing to her Lover, her Father. I missed You today, she would sing in her low vibrato.

This was and is all in His fiery, red-hot eye. All of you were glowing in his imagination before the dusk of earth’s first morning.

Amy McDonald