Reading Psalm 90 this morning through the lens of a DNA specialist – a leading researcher who, along with the National Geographic Society, has spearheaded a world-wide DNA collection project to help determine humanity’s origins.  Ah – how we all seek God!  We are given the seed – the GOD gene…it is in our make-up – to seek our Creator and to be sought by God at the same time.  After hearing Spencer Wells speak, just the next day, a second group of leading DNA scientists published a report that concluded human migration from Africa to the four corners of the world was not a singular event and a singular path.  No, by analyzing just one strand of Aboriginal hair, these scientists suggest that humanity diverged from Africa into at least two ways – essentially, in more than one way – with some staying put, some traveling West and others – across desert AND miles of ocean, traveled to what is now Australia.  Some practical problems present when you go to deep with this thought – at least from a scientific perspective – but I wonder, if instead one reads these human  migration reports that are coming from the scientific world in conjunction with scripture which comes from God, if some of these practical inconsistencies don’t just fall into place?

Wells asserted that something called a “climate pump” seems to have preceded ALL human migration patterns which then leads scientists to conclude that: 1) human origins all lead back to Africa – we are ALL connected to the first humans in Africa – and 2) that humanity spread into parts unknown because they were forced to by major climate changes – ice ages, wind storms, deserts, tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, just to name a few (shouldn’t forget asteroids).

Ted Talk from Sean Carroll

Which leads me to today’s reading from the Psalter and the recognition, once again, that God is IN all these climatic events…God IS the pump that prompts migration, change, destruction of a people and survival of a people – over all corners of the world, if not the universe.  Here, Moses prays:

 Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations.  2 Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.  3 You turn us back to dust, and say, “Turn back, you mortals.”  4 For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, or like a watch in the night.  5 You sweep them away; they are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning;  6 in the morning it flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers.

Indeed.  How helpful it is to be reminded by HIM through the prayers of our ancestors the answer to our question,  from whence we came?  When I truly grasp this, the questions that science is in such hot pursuit to answer through modern methods of DNA analysis, I get excited at the prospect that our God gene WILL one day be known and that this  body of humanity – the scientists and all its followers, will have sought and been found by our Lord.