Today is Dian Fossey's birthday.  Wonderful scientist who worked with gorillas in the mountain forests of Rawanda.  Her death there in tribal chaos serves as a two-sided monument.   Wikipedia on Dian Fossey

It reminds us of the wonders of  God's creation, the mysterious relationships between animals and humans, and the amazing detail that is found when we look long enough.  And it reminds us of the astounding capacity of human nature to fight and destroy.  Rawanda, Burundi, Uganda and other nations have histories of self-destruction that are wilder than fiction, and tend to repeat.

A naive older friend once said to me:  "Oh, nobody ever went to war over food!"  But when the prosperous grind down the poor, the end result eventually is revolution and chaos.

In Genesis, the very opening, the Spirit of God is brooding over the chaos of the un-shaped natural world.  God's FIRST act is to transform chaos into a livable Graden of Eden.  There's a pattern, a test-case, a monument, that says very simply what God DOES is what God WILLS.  Life-giving change is His expectation.