In the Garden of Eden, baby
This is an excerpt from the book Searching for God Knows What by Donald Miller. I think this is one of the most beautiful things that I've ever read and I wanted to share it with you.
"And then I began to wonder about Eve, what the scene might have looked like when she and Adam first met. Dante paints the meeting as being more realistic than I had imagined, writing that the slow-to-love Eve did not find Adam the least bit attractive, becoming enamored, instead, with her own reflection in some water. It's true women are terribly enamored with their own reflections. You can't blame them, though. If I were good-looking, I would certainly go around looking at myself all the time, too. And it is also true women are slow to love. I used to think it was because something was wrong with them, but, over time, I wondered whether they were more deliberate than men about important decisions. Romantic decisions. And in comparison I realized they were infinitely more intelligent about relational matters than men...
...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...
...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..
....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...
...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...
...Moses said the whole time Adam was naming the animals, that entire hundred years, he couldn't find a helpmate suitable for him...
...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...
...And then I thought how very beautiful it was that God made Adam work for so long because there is no way, after a hundred years of being alone, looking for somebody whom you could connect with in your soul, that you would take advantage of a woman once you met one. She would be the most precious creation in all the world, and you would probably wake up every morning and look at her and wonder at her beauty, or the gentle, silent way she sleeps...
...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..."
i don't know if my excerpts do the book justice, but dang, that is so amazing.
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"And then I began to wonder about Eve, what the scene might have looked like when she and Adam first met. Dante paints the meeting as being more realistic than I had imagined, writing that the slow-to-love Eve did not find Adam the least bit attractive, becoming enamored, instead, with her own reflection in some water. It's true women are terribly enamored with their own reflections. You can't blame them, though. If I were good-looking, I would certainly go around looking at myself all the time, too. And it is also true women are slow to love. I used to think it was because something was wrong with them, but, over time, I wondered whether they were more deliberate than men about important decisions. Romantic decisions. And in comparison I realized they were infinitely more intelligent about relational matters than men...
...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...
...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..
....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...
...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...
...Moses said the whole time Adam was naming the animals, that entire hundred years, he couldn't find a helpmate suitable for him...
...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...
...And then I thought how very beautiful it was that God made Adam work for so long because there is no way, after a hundred years of being alone, looking for somebody whom you could connect with in your soul, that you would take advantage of a woman once you met one. She would be the most precious creation in all the world, and you would probably wake up every morning and look at her and wonder at her beauty, or the gentle, silent way she sleeps...
...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..."
i don't know if my excerpts do the book justice, but dang, that is so amazing.
Go to my site
My diary