As I wandered my way through Ukrainian countryside last week, I noticed my mind frequently turning to Eden. There's something about unending unpleasantries that pricks our heart's ache for paradise, isn't there?
On the train ride down to Crimea I read the story of Adam and Eve for fun. Twenty-one hours leaves you with a lot of thinking to do, and it's best to choose healthy things to occupy that brain space before cabin fever sets in. Accordingly, the book of Romans and Genesis 3 became my mental bag of potato chips for the trip.
The Fall is so relevant to our lives even now, and not merely because we walk in innate iniquity because of it. It's relevant because the devil only has one sales pitch, the same marketing scheme he used with Eve and the same one he uses with us day in and day out.
He tells the truth – just in a different way than God does.
He knows truth sounds better than fiction, beauty more attractive than pain. That's why sin is so magnetic – he never sells us anything that we wouldn't want in the first place. When he makes his move on Eve, he doesn't lie to her, which is what whet her appetite and made her lick her lips just before the world's most unfortunate fruit sampling.
This is going to make you like God. You'll know things only God knows.
What sounds better than that? In our glaring imperfection we're always searching for that which makes us more of whatever we think we need. To be like God, well, that's the best thing you could offer us – we lack something, and we know it deep within us. We want everything we can have, including knowledge that God wanted to protect us from.
What God called death, Satan called knowing good and evil, and he wasn't lying. Knowing good and evil means knowing death.
It's what our culture values as having emotional highs and lows, and we even harp on the lesson that we're grateful for lows because they make the highs more enjoyable by comparison. Coming from the world's foremost expert on living an emotional roller coaster of a life, it's not all it's cracked up to be. It's left me feeling beat up, bruised and battered more times than not. Sure, my highs have been awesome; if they weren't, I wouldn't have continued living that way. But usually, after the moment has passed and I'm on my way back down the mountain – the really high, awesome mountain with a great view and intoxicating thrill and exhilaration – I'm filled with regret, sorrow, shame, desperation and loneliness.
Because we were created to live steady lives.
In the Garden we see that God has it set up such that we have no knowledge of good and evil. Only good. Only a flatline, stable life that consists of breezy, naked walks with Love, wind in our hair and flowers kissing our bare legs in a blissful gift of ignorance that knows nothing other than Eden and needs no comparison to know that it's paradise.
Satan sold Eve a mountaintop, an emotional high, telling her she'd know what real good feels like, the kind only God knows about and won't let her have. That God, he says, he's a selfish pleasure hog and never lets us get what we want. Eat this fruit and become like him, know the real meaning of pleasure. Know what a real moment of good feels like.
He just left out the part where we know the real meaning of pain, too.
And what Eve didn't see was that she was already living on the highest mountain available to us. Satan showed her the fruit of the tree that was "good for food, a delight to the eyes, and desirable to make one wise," and Eve didn't have the sense to see that she already had plenty of food, she lived in an entire garden that was a delight to the eyes and that wisdom was not something she personally needed since she could just go walking with It on a daily basis.
What God called good, Satan showed to Eve and said, "…but there's better."
What God called a valley, Satan sold as the beauty of comparison.
What God called paradise, Satan sold as unfulfilling, one-note. Boring.
This is going to make you like God.
Since Bolivia I've been making self-discipline a habit to try to overcome my life of emotional highs and lows. I've been fighting for steady, and in the process I've noticed that my days are oftentimes just days, that I don't really feel that happy but I'm not overwhelmingly sad, either.
And it hasn't been awesome. To be honest, maybe 70% of the time the fruit seems to taste better.
I still struggle. I still want to sin the same ways. I still yearn for the mountains I once knew even knowing they'll inevitably lead to deep valleys, because I'm salivating for the taste of the fruit that Satan sells so well that I've purchased so many times before. It's pleasing to the eyes, and it's really good food. It's appetizing to live the life I once did.
It's appetizing and it's invigorating to sin boldly, because that's where the mountains feel highest and the fruit is ripe and juicy.
But for whatever reason (I'll call it grace), I've decided that I'll fight for steady against all logic and reason in my brain. Somewhere inside me I feel my heart beating to be back in Eden. And it's hard. It's hard to believe that the steadiness of the Garden is better than the knowledge of good and evil, because knowing good and evil reminds us just how good good is.
Even though it doesn't feel as fulfilling to enter into a steady life, when I look back on my life over the past few months something is different.
I don't have secrets.
I'm not hiding anything.
I'm consistent.
I'm congruent.
I'm, well… steady.
I'm one person. Because I'm beginning to choose to be content walking among the flowers in Eden with tunnel vision on the rest of the Garden's trees rather than reaching for the one tree that offers me one high and immediately searching for another, knowing somewhere in me that staying put among God's plants will ultimately be more satisfying than visiting thousands of Satan's highest mountaintops. It doesn't make sense, it doesn't always invoke the euphoria I became so accustomed to feeling pulse through my veins, but being in this spiritual place is peaceful.
It's quiet and still.
I smile a lot.
There's a nice breeze.
And the company… it's Good.
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