I just finished the last edits on When Life Doesn’t Match Your Dreams. Next step will be publication and release in February 2019!
As I reread what I had written as I imagined Eve’s story (she’s first in the book), I had one of those “ah ha” moments. An epiphany if you will. It’s not like I didn’t already know this, but it never quite hit me this way.
When Adam and Eve ate the fruit, when they disobeyed God’s only command, the worst consequence was not death. I know that sounds like I’m contradicting Scripture, but hang in there with me a moment. God said that if they ate the fruit they would die. And death has been with us ever since, both physical and spiritual. I’m not denying that truth.
But to me, the biggest, most starkly sad consequence that their disobedience brought upon the human race was separation.
Paradise was lost because they no longer had that closeness to God or to each other.
While death separates us from this life, and spiritual death separates us from God in eternity, we experience the consequences of this sin long before we ever face death.
Adam and Eve gave up their perfect relationship to God and lost those walks with Him in the garden in the cool of the day.
They lost the perfect relationship they had to each other because the first thing they did was start to blame the other for what happened.
They lost relationship to the animals, because for the first time fear entered the relationship between humans and animals.
They lost relationship to the garden, to paradise, and now had to work the ground in hostile soil.
Relationship with God and with our families and friends and neighbors and co-workers and acquaintances and church-goers. Every single relationship of which we are part is tainted by that one choice to disobey God.
That makes me sad because if you read my work, you know that if a story can be fixed, I try to see a way for at least one of the relationships to be reconciled.
I think we all hate brokenness. We hate broken relationships, but we all have them. And we can either work to repair them or we can build walls to keep people away, to keep God away.
Now God is never kept out by walls. If He wants to enter, He has the power to enter. If He wants to fix things, He can. He holds Himself back from doing so only if we humans refuse His help. But call on Him even once and He listens.
How often do we call on Him to fix our messes, our relationship issues? I daresay most of us either give up on a relationship because of hurt or pain, or we try in our own abilities to make things better. But better is only better by God’s grace. Nothing short of that lasts.
Separation is a complicated subject, and I’m not trying to state everything about it here. It just occurred to me that the saddest consequence of the Fall of Man was the death of relationship between us and God and us and each other.
And I wish we did. All of my life, seeing broken things mended, bringing restoration to previously unhappy situations has been the desire of my heart. I can’t fix anything, of course. But it hurts my heart to see people torn apart in any situation or scenario. It makes me long for a better country, a place whose architect and builder is God. A time when God will bring all of the consequences that sin brought to an end. A time when we will be whole again.
I wonder if Eve realized that death meant so much more than physical parting from her body. Death has seeped into everything we touch, morbid as that sounds. Apart from grace.
I look forward to that day. In the meantime, I do my best to live grace and forgive and break down walls. I hope you will too.
#livegrace #paradiserestored #separation #restoration #relationships #paradiselost #allthingsnew
