You may have figured out by now that one of my favorite books in the Bible, the Hebrew Bible in particular, is Ecclesiastes.  Today, I offer what I consider to be a pearl of wisdom from chapter seven of that text.
     "It is good," the writer says, "to grasp one thing and not let go of the other.  For the one who trusts God will come forth with them both."  Many years ago, I served on the board of a church in our area.  Every spring, we worked out the budget for the following year.  For all the previous years of the church's existence, the board had based the budget on the amounts that parishioners pledged to give during that upcoming year.  Hence, as I saw it, the church board was structuring its vision for what it could do on the basis of what it received.
     Thinking about this verse, I suggested this:  why don't we sketch out our vision for the next year, not worrying, within limits, about the costs, and trust that the money will come through?  Oddly enough, no one had thought about this before.  But everyone was willing to try it, to "take hold" of what we thought we could get, yet "not let go" of what we really wanted to do.
     It worked.  We had enough to fund operations, plus plenty more to underwrite the implementation of our broader vision.  What's my point?  If God, the infinite and inexhaustible God, undergirds the universe, it would seem that the cosmos's potential for newness, boldness, and adventure is virtually unlimited.  Not that the cosmos would not possess nearly unlimited potential without God, but that without God the cosmos is still no more than a twist of physicality, here today, and gone tomorrow, without a purpose or a point, its possibilities forever gone.  Purpose looms largest in the hourglass of eternity.