One day, more than thirty years ago, I was reading from a book on science when the words “ours is a watery planet’ seemed to stand out on the page. Of course I knew that our world was almost two thirds covered in water, but at that moment it struck a chord since I had read similar descriptions in the bible.

Ours is a watery planet. THAT WAS IT! In the Bible, the symbol for life is water. All living things have to have water, and all that lives is mostly made of water. It would seem natural then that where ever there is water there would be life of some kind. It is a perfect symbol. The Bible speaks of there being ‘many waters’ in the heavens, and there are ‘peoples and nations and tongues’.

We are not alone, and I was intrigued! Persistently, I searched the Good Book for other hidden treasures that we may have lost through misinterpretation. I found more than I had expected to find and, for the next year, I indulged myself in gathering notes on bits of paper and storing them in a cardboard box in a drawer.

My life, until then, had been a Christian one, which means that I no longer attend church services. I was born into an evangelical Baptist home and firmly believed in God, and in a heaven and a hell. Nevertheless, since early childhood, I have also been interested in the natural sciences; especially in astronomy, archaeology, and paleontology. Despite the church’s teachings, I furtively believe that the world was millions of years old, dinosaurs once roamed the earth, and that we are primates. I also believed that the Bible was the Word of God which supposedly contradicted the theory of evolution. What was the truth?

Three decades passed and I was an enthusiastic fan of the space program and its search for life. We were seeing the dawn of a New Age, with new thoughts, ideas and discoveries.

The coming of the 21^st century, however, has also brought turmoil between religion and science. Ignorance has once again raised its head as Christians in America demand that their children believe in a six day creation and that god came down and molded man out of mud. And we again have with us the prophets of doom – who predict the world will end sometime in the year 2000.

It was time to retrieve the old cardboard box and, in 1998, I began to write The Many Waters.

Lauretta E. Lueck
Calgary, Alberta
May 2000