Eden Remembered and Redemption Revealed
Adapted from Genesis 3-4 and the Story of Eve
“Adam made love to his wife again, and she gave birth to a son and named him Seth, saying, ‘God has granted me another child in place of Abel, since Cain killed him.’” - Genesis 4:25
He is sleeping peacefully now.
Seth. His name means granted or appointed. The Father granted me this gift. Even though I did not deserve it. Even though I rejected His original and perfect plan for us.
I am watching the rise and fall of his tiny chest in the lamplight, and I cannot stop the tears that have been gathering behind my eyes since the moment he was placed in my arms. They are not tears from a single source. They never are, not anymore. Joy and grief have become such close companions that I am no longer able to distinguish them sometimes. They arrive together now, always together, like two rivers merging into an ocean of forward-facing hope.
I have been sitting here for what must be hours. Thinking. Remembering. I do that more than I should.
There was a morning. The morning. The only morning that truly matters in the recounting of all my days, when the world was different. When we were different. The air smelled like something I no longer have a word for. Clean is too small. Whole is closer, but still not enough. The light fell through the leaves without effort or obstruction, and the sound of His voice moving through the garden was the most natural sound we heard in the garden teeming with life.
I had everything. Everything. And I sat on that rock and looked at the one thing I had been told I could not have. As infatuating as the ideas were, I decided that I knew better. Better than to desire. Better than to fantasize. I shouldn’t have allowed my curiosity space to breathe. But I did. Far past the point of no return. I stood up, unable to retreat to safety.
I have turned that moment over in my mind ten thousand times since we were sent out of Eden. I have pressed it and examined it from every angle, trying to understand how I could have been so completely, catastrophically deceived. The serpent was convincing; that much is sure. His words had a logic to them that felt like wisdom. “You will be like God,” he said. As if I were not already made in His image. As if what I was already given was not enough.
But I cannot credit the serpent with all of it. That would be too easy. I wanted it, no, I craved it in the depths of my soul.
That’s the part that still burns. I saw the fruit, and it pulled at me from the inside. And I took it. I made the choice with both hands open. I handed it to Adam, and he took it without argument, without hesitation, without asking a single question of the One who had given us everything we needed for wholeness and simply asked us to trust Him with this one thing.
We both knew the moment it happened. There was no dramatic announcement. No booming voice to condemn us. Just an awful, sudden awareness. The presence of ourselves, of each other, of the distance that had not been there a moment before. We scrambled for fig leaves like children caught in a lie, trying to hide the evidence of our crime.
And then He called out quietly.
“Where are you?”
He knew where we were. He has always known. That question was not for His benefit. It was for ours. It is still for ours, I think. Where are you? Where have you gone? How far have you run from the perfection I gave to you? Why are we distanced?
I have been asking myself those questions ever since.
The ground in our new home is hard and unforgiving. I know every stone of it now. My hands are not the hands I was given, they are cracked and calloused from pulling and planting and fighting for things that once required no effort. Adam labors until the sweat drips off his chin, and still the thorns come back. The earth resists us now. It was not made to resist us. That is the part that breaks my heart again and again, not that the work is hard, but that it was never meant to be this way..
I did that. We did that. Adam and I. And somehow, you too. We did this TOGETHER.
And then Cain. Oh, my firstborn. Oh, the weight of his choices in my chest.
When he was born I thought, well, I genuinely believed, that he was the promised one. The seed who would crush the serpent’s head. I held him up, and I declared it out loud. “I have brought forth a man with the help of the LORD.” I, as if any good thing could come from me. I was still believing I had something to offer more than what He had given me.
Cain. I thought he was our hope. I wanted so badly for the story to begin its redemption with him.
And then Abel.
And then the field.
And then silence, the kind of silence that has no answer, the kind a mother falls into and is never entirely the same when she climbs back out. The kind that changes you in ways you wish would never be known.
I have grieved in ways that I cannot explain to anyone who has not stood over the body of a child they held as an infant. I have screamed at the sky. I have gone days without eating. I have looked at Adam and seen in his eyes the same hollow place that lives in mine and found neither of us had words sufficient for it.
Two people who broke the world together, now sitting in the wreckage together, with nothing to offer one another but presence. And a mutual embrace of the One who can redeem our failures. Who can make all things new and begin again, although different this time.
But Seth. This boy sleeping beside me. “God has granted me another child in place of Abel.” I said. When I said those words aloud, I tasted something I had almost forgotten existed. Not Eden, I am not confused enough to think I can go back to Eden. That road is closed and guarded, and I have made my peace with that. No. It was something else. Something new.
Seth will grow up in a hard world that we, Adam and I, perpetuated. He will feel the ground resist him, and fight the grief of what this family has carried. He will know what his brother did in that field. He will know the weight of what his parents lost and what it cost every generation that will follow.
But he will also know this. That his mother sat in the lamplight and watched him breathe and chose, again, to believe that God does not abandon what He loves. That the God who came walking in the garden, who called out to two people hiding in shame, did not walk away and leave us there.
He clothed us.
He covered what we could not cover ourselves. And He spoke a promise over us before He sent us out into the hard and beautiful and grief-soaked world we had broken. I did not deserve that. I have never once, not for a single morning, deserved that.
And that is precisely the point. He chooses not to give us what we deserve! He chooses to replace it with an incalculable measure of unearned and unadulterated Grace.
Seth is stirring now, his tiny fingers stretching wide and then curling back. His eyes open for just a moment, dark and searching and new, and then closed again. I pull him close and feel the warmth of him against my chest, as pure and innocent as that gift of redemption, and I weep. Not from despair. From the staggering, reckless grace of being given again what I forfeited on that wretched morning.
You have been handed things you didn’t earn. You have stood in the wreckage of choices you cannot take back.
So here is the question Seth is asking you just by breathing:
Do you believe the story is still moving toward something good, and are you willing to live like it is?