October 19, 2009

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men: yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. Ecclesiastes 3:11

After six years of renovations, the Thomas Edison Historic Park in West Orange, New Jersey is now open.

Visitors can see more of the buildings and artifacts on a self-guided tour, and rent a nifty audio guide to help explain things along the way. It was here that Edison improved his favorite invention, the phonograph, and built the first motion picture studio, the Black Maria. Nearby is his gorgeous home, Glenmont, which is also open for tours.

Joe and I learned a lot about the always curious, incredibly gifted and productive inventor when we went to the grand reopening weekend. In his lifetime, Edison acquired 1,093 patents, ran thirty companies—manufacturing, among other things,  furniture, appliances and cement (his product went into the original Yankee Stadium)—and employed 4,000 workers, mostly German and Scandinavian immigrants he didn’t pay very well. They came to be known as “muckers,” since they did the majority of the grunt work. His close assistants called themselves “The Insomnia Squad”, because they often put in long hours alongside the boss. Edison really did live out one of his most famous sayings: “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

But one Edison quote from the introductory film really stuck with me afterwards: “For every problem God has given us, the Lord has a solution…If we can’t find a solution, why blame the Lord?” It’s an interesting, even amusing, saying—but only half right.

God certainly does have the solution to every problem! But we will never uncover the answer to every mystery and every conundrum, no matter what our intellectual capacity.

When you come down to it, Edison’s conclusion, instead of conceding God’s superior wisdom and power, actually puts us humans on equal par with our Creator. And that’s laughable, as God so eloquently (and ironically) tells us:

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation…
Have you ever given orders to the morning, or shown
the dawn its place…Have you comprehended the vast
expanses of the earth…Can you bring forth the
constellations in their seasons…Do you send the
lightning bolts on their way? Do they report to you,
‘Here we are’…Who has a claim against Me that I
must pay? Everything under heaven belongs to Me.
(from Job chapters 38-41)

Job replied, as we certainly must, “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know” (Job 42:3).

I don’t know exactly where Thomas Edison stood with God. When I read some of his other quotes, I get the sense he tended to trust in his own brainpower much more than the One who gave him his brilliant mind.

Heaven forbid that, in our quest to learn, explore and invent, we fail to acknowledge and honor the One who put  the innate drive to do so in us in the first place.