I went to a wedding this weekend, totally beautiful and exciting, and I really think it is just what God had in mind when he created us. It’s the picture of harmony, and humility, and a give-and-take that is just…. right. I’m so happy for Jenny and Mike, and know that God will bless them for the rest of their lives, together. And instead of feeling pitiful like usual, and dreading going, I was excited. Genuinely okay with it, lol. (I know, so shallow). But God is good, I've been thinking about a book I read a couple of years ago when it came out. Decided to revisit it.
So this is a very long post, not because of me, but because I think this chapter just captures what's simmering in my brain. It’s from Don Miller’s “Searching for God Knows What”
“… when I was reading the text (again), I noticed Adam and Eve didn’t meet right away. Moses said God knew Adam was lonely or incomplete or however you want to say it, but God did not create Eve directly after He stated Adam was lonely. This struck me as funny because a lot of times when I think about life before the Fall, I don’t think of people going around lonely. But that thought also comforted me because I realized loneliness in my own life doesn’t mean I am a complete screwup, rather that God made me this way. You always picture the perfect human being as somebody who doesn’t need anybody, like a guy on a horse out in Colorado or whatever. But here is Adam, the only perfect guy in the world, and he is going around wanting to be with somebody else, needing another person to fulfill a certain emptiness in his life. And as I said, when God saw this, He did not create Eve right away. He did not give Adam what he needed immediately. He waited. He told Adam to name the animals.
Now I had read this a thousand times, just glancing over it you know, but this time, reading it without looking for a magical formula, I actually thought about what would be involved in a job as big as naming the animals. In my mind this had been such an effortless action; Adam sits on a log with his hand on his chin, God parades the animals by rather quickly, Adam calls out names under his breath: Buffalo, chimp, horse, mouse, lizard, buffalo… Uh, wait – did I already say buffalo? Um, well – how about cow; did I already say cow?
But could it really have been so effortless? On that particular trip to Yosemite I took along the journals of John Muir, the guy who came up with the glacier theory for Yosemite Valley, a theory that says great glaciers carved the rocks that make up the walls of the place. I sat there in Yosemite reading about Muir’s glacier theory, knowing it took him years of research, experiments, and canvassing the valley to develop the philosophy, and I wondered in my mind how he must have sat on the mountainside, drawing diagrams of El Captain and Half Dome, wondering about the great wall of ice that cut through the granit slopes. And if it took John Muir the better portion of his life to realize his theory about the landscape in small Yosemite, I wondered, then, how much longer it must have taken Adam to name the animals in all the earth? I wondered how long it must have taken him to journey to the ocean to name the sea life, and whether he had to make a boat and go out on a boat or whether God had them swim up close to the shore, so Adam only had to go in about waist-deep.
I looked up how many animals there are in the world, and it turns out there are between ten million and one hundred million different species. So even if you believe in evolution, that means there were between one million and fifty million species around in the time of the Garden, and Adam, apparently, had to name all of them. And the entire time he was lonely.
I never thought of Adam the same again. The image of the man holding the fig leaf seemed nearly crude. Rather this was a man who, despite feeling a certain need for a companion, performed what must have been nearly one hundred years of work, naming and perhaps even categorizing the animals. It would have taken him nearly a year just to name the species of snakes alone. Moses said that Eve didn’t give birth to their third child till Adam was well into his hundreds, which means they would have had Cain and Abel some thirty or so years before, which also means either it took Adam more than a hundred years to name the animals, or he and Eve didn’t have sex for a good, long, boring century. And so in my mind, I began to see Adam as a lonely naturalist, a sort of Charles Darwin character, capturing animals and studying their hooves and heads and tails and eating habits and mating rituals. It must have been absolutely thrilling work, to be hones, thrilling and more than a little tiring.
The thing is, when Adam finished naming the animals, after all his work and effort, God put him to sleep, took a rib out of his side, and fashioned a woman. I had read that part a thousand times, too, but I don’t think I quite realized how beautiful this moment was. Moses said the whole time Adam was naming the animals, that entire hundred years, he couldn’t find a helpmate suitable for him. That means while he was naming cattle he was lonely because he couldn’t really communicate in the same way with the cattle and when he was naming fish he probably wanted to go swim in the ocean with them, but he couldn’t breathe underwater; and the entire time he could not imagine what a helpmate might look like, how a helpmate might talk, the ways in which a helpmate might think. The idea of another person had, perhaps, never entered Adam’s mind. Just like a kid who grows up without a father has no idea what having a father would be like, a guy who grows up the only human would have no idea what having another human around would be like. So here was this guy who was intensely relational, needing other people, and in order to cause him to appreciate the gift of companionship, God had him hang out with chimps for a hundred years. It’s quite beautiful, really. God directed Adam’s steps so that when He created Eve, Adam would have the utmost appreciation, respect, gratitude.
I think it was smart of God because today, now that there are women all around and a guy can go on the Internet and see them naked anytime he wants, the whole species has been devalued. If I were a girl today in America, I would be a feminist for sure.
… You probably think I am being mushy and romantic, but the first time Moses breaks into poetry in the Bible is when Adam first meets Eve. The thing about Moses was, he was the king of understatements. He could pack a million thoughts and emotions into just a few words. Here’s what he said about what Adam thought when he met Eve:
“Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” (Genesis 2:23)
If you think about these ideas they are quite meaningful, and the bit of poetry Moses came up with truly summarizes the scene because, for the first time in his life, Adam was seeing a person who was like him, only more beautiful, and smarter in the ways of love and encouragement, and more deliberate in the ways of relationships. He must have thought to himself that she was perfect, and after a few days of just talking and getting to know each other, they must have fallen deeply in love.”
God made us this way! How perfect. When loneliness strikes (cause it does like a mallet on a gopher head at the fair), I just am reminded that God is the author of this story- and He is an excellent writer. And I’m not just talking about love stories, but just flat out relational stories. I'm gonna leave it there, since this is long, and Miller said it so well. Maybe more another day...
So this is a very long post, not because of me, but because I think this chapter just captures what's simmering in my brain. It’s from Don Miller’s “Searching for God Knows What”
“… when I was reading the text (again), I noticed Adam and Eve didn’t meet right away. Moses said God knew Adam was lonely or incomplete or however you want to say it, but God did not create Eve directly after He stated Adam was lonely. This struck me as funny because a lot of times when I think about life before the Fall, I don’t think of people going around lonely. But that thought also comforted me because I realized loneliness in my own life doesn’t mean I am a complete screwup, rather that God made me this way. You always picture the perfect human being as somebody who doesn’t need anybody, like a guy on a horse out in Colorado or whatever. But here is Adam, the only perfect guy in the world, and he is going around wanting to be with somebody else, needing another person to fulfill a certain emptiness in his life. And as I said, when God saw this, He did not create Eve right away. He did not give Adam what he needed immediately. He waited. He told Adam to name the animals.
Now I had read this a thousand times, just glancing over it you know, but this time, reading it without looking for a magical formula, I actually thought about what would be involved in a job as big as naming the animals. In my mind this had been such an effortless action; Adam sits on a log with his hand on his chin, God parades the animals by rather quickly, Adam calls out names under his breath: Buffalo, chimp, horse, mouse, lizard, buffalo… Uh, wait – did I already say buffalo? Um, well – how about cow; did I already say cow?
But could it really have been so effortless? On that particular trip to Yosemite I took along the journals of John Muir, the guy who came up with the glacier theory for Yosemite Valley, a theory that says great glaciers carved the rocks that make up the walls of the place. I sat there in Yosemite reading about Muir’s glacier theory, knowing it took him years of research, experiments, and canvassing the valley to develop the philosophy, and I wondered in my mind how he must have sat on the mountainside, drawing diagrams of El Captain and Half Dome, wondering about the great wall of ice that cut through the granit slopes. And if it took John Muir the better portion of his life to realize his theory about the landscape in small Yosemite, I wondered, then, how much longer it must have taken Adam to name the animals in all the earth? I wondered how long it must have taken him to journey to the ocean to name the sea life, and whether he had to make a boat and go out on a boat or whether God had them swim up close to the shore, so Adam only had to go in about waist-deep.
I looked up how many animals there are in the world, and it turns out there are between ten million and one hundred million different species. So even if you believe in evolution, that means there were between one million and fifty million species around in the time of the Garden, and Adam, apparently, had to name all of them. And the entire time he was lonely.
I never thought of Adam the same again. The image of the man holding the fig leaf seemed nearly crude. Rather this was a man who, despite feeling a certain need for a companion, performed what must have been nearly one hundred years of work, naming and perhaps even categorizing the animals. It would have taken him nearly a year just to name the species of snakes alone. Moses said that Eve didn’t give birth to their third child till Adam was well into his hundreds, which means they would have had Cain and Abel some thirty or so years before, which also means either it took Adam more than a hundred years to name the animals, or he and Eve didn’t have sex for a good, long, boring century. And so in my mind, I began to see Adam as a lonely naturalist, a sort of Charles Darwin character, capturing animals and studying their hooves and heads and tails and eating habits and mating rituals. It must have been absolutely thrilling work, to be hones, thrilling and more than a little tiring.
The thing is, when Adam finished naming the animals, after all his work and effort, God put him to sleep, took a rib out of his side, and fashioned a woman. I had read that part a thousand times, too, but I don’t think I quite realized how beautiful this moment was. Moses said the whole time Adam was naming the animals, that entire hundred years, he couldn’t find a helpmate suitable for him. That means while he was naming cattle he was lonely because he couldn’t really communicate in the same way with the cattle and when he was naming fish he probably wanted to go swim in the ocean with them, but he couldn’t breathe underwater; and the entire time he could not imagine what a helpmate might look like, how a helpmate might talk, the ways in which a helpmate might think. The idea of another person had, perhaps, never entered Adam’s mind. Just like a kid who grows up without a father has no idea what having a father would be like, a guy who grows up the only human would have no idea what having another human around would be like. So here was this guy who was intensely relational, needing other people, and in order to cause him to appreciate the gift of companionship, God had him hang out with chimps for a hundred years. It’s quite beautiful, really. God directed Adam’s steps so that when He created Eve, Adam would have the utmost appreciation, respect, gratitude.
I think it was smart of God because today, now that there are women all around and a guy can go on the Internet and see them naked anytime he wants, the whole species has been devalued. If I were a girl today in America, I would be a feminist for sure.
… You probably think I am being mushy and romantic, but the first time Moses breaks into poetry in the Bible is when Adam first meets Eve. The thing about Moses was, he was the king of understatements. He could pack a million thoughts and emotions into just a few words. Here’s what he said about what Adam thought when he met Eve:
“Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” (Genesis 2:23)
If you think about these ideas they are quite meaningful, and the bit of poetry Moses came up with truly summarizes the scene because, for the first time in his life, Adam was seeing a person who was like him, only more beautiful, and smarter in the ways of love and encouragement, and more deliberate in the ways of relationships. He must have thought to himself that she was perfect, and after a few days of just talking and getting to know each other, they must have fallen deeply in love.”
God made us this way! How perfect. When loneliness strikes (cause it does like a mallet on a gopher head at the fair), I just am reminded that God is the author of this story- and He is an excellent writer. And I’m not just talking about love stories, but just flat out relational stories. I'm gonna leave it there, since this is long, and Miller said it so well. Maybe more another day...
3 comments:
Beyootiful! Love it! And what a lovely couple:)
for sure.. you're in love !
for the record... the only man i am in love with is jesus (and my daddy's nice too)
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