rethinking Noah and learning to roll

In youth group we are going through a series on the covenants in the bible. Basically, at key points God formalizes his relationship with his people and these are called covenants. These were the contracts of the Ancient Near East and used between business partners, kings and their vassals, friends, spouses, and in similar settings. This week we looked at God's covenant with Noah and in my preparation I had a slight paradigm shift. When you are a little kid, most of your interaction with Noah comes from cute pictures where this old guy with a beard loads animals onto an ark. As I was thinking about the account of the flood God's rescue of Noah in the ark images from the various hurricanes and the tsunami in SE Asia came to mind. The idea of a world-wide flood is hard to imagine and puts God's promise to Noah to never again flood the earth in a totally different context. Another thing which surprised me is the Bible's later use of the flood to describe cleansing. While the flood brought destruction, it also brought cleansing and New Testament authors take up this theme at different places and speak of God's coming cleansing of this world. This has given me a new way to look back at the account of Noah to look forward to what God will do. And though this is only related by the theme of water, I'm going to attend an instructional session put on by the Appalachian Mountain Club of CT, this Saturday and learn how to Eskimo Roll in my kayak. I'm pretty excited.