Yesterday I got to work on the overgrown flower bed in the back yard and I filled out the home study application- all but some of Keith's information. There were six pages of it.
The papers are waiting now in the black folder that Keith and I bought a couple weeks ago, just for that purpose.
When he gets back, we'll mail it in and in seventy two hours, we'll know if we were accepted or not, and if we are, we'll begin gathering up all the documents to complete their program.
I've just been resting and slowly moving from one task to another, and thinking.
Last night I was reading in Genesis and I was astonished at the story of the Garden of Eden.
In fact, it makes me think of something Annie Dillard wrote in An American Childhood:
"The adult members of society adverted to the Bible unreasonable often. What arcana! Why did they spread this scandalous document before our eyes? If they had read it, I thought, they would have hid it."
So, I was reading it, and it struck me, suddenly, that Adam and Eve were not allowed to eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.
I suddenly saw this in a new way. It meant they could not tell the difference between good and evil- they did not know good or evil, so they could not classify them.
If you do not know the difference between good and evil, how can you have a conscience? Isn't that the very definition of a conscience?
This was on purpose- in fact, it was the Divine purpose. God Himself forbade them a conscience.
Why? Why would God do this?
So I asked Him. And He reminded me that, even though they did not know good and evil, they knew Him.
They were in intimate relationship with God Himself. There was no shame in their being naked before Him.
They understood the world around them through God, their Creator, their Father, their Friend.
You might even say that God Himself was their conscience. After all, God perfectly understood the difference between good and evil.
But they choose to take this knowledge apart from Him- to take it for themselves.
I think we still do this. We want to be like God and make moral judgments, even if this means we're secretly ashamed of ourselves and lonely, wearing smelling skins and eating our bread by the sweat of our face.
But we tell ourselves- surely it will nourish me, and it looks so attractive, and most of all, it feels so powerful, to be wise!
For some reason, we aren't satisfied to be His child in the garden, and walk with Him in the cool of the day, naked and unashamed, and free to eat of every tree in the garden, but for one.
Because didn't Jesus come to fulfill the law- to absorb it back into Himself, as it were? We are converted, and become, again, as children- His children.
Then God Himself becomes our conscience all over again- we need know nothing more than that we love Him with everything that we are, and we love others as ourselves.
