After the Fall

Can you imagine what life must have been like for Adam and Eve? They lived in the Garden of Eden - a perfect place. They lived with no sin - a perfect existence. They had everything they needed and communed with God regularly.


Requirements for living in the garden were quite simple: don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Visualize the garden. It was as lush a garden as ever planted. Every plant grew and produced fruits and vegetables. Adam and Eve lacked nothing when dinner-time came.


Why are our eyes always drawn to what we should not look at? Sitting in a restaurant, the wife tells her husband about someone across the room and says, "But don't look!" What does he do? He turns and gawks. He probably points and says, "You mean him?"



The Lord has given us plenty of room to travel on this Christian road. Jesus says the gate is small and the road is narrow - in comparison to the broad road that leads to destruction (Matthew 7:13-14). Paul says we have great freedom within the Christian faith (Galatians 5). The problem is not the width of the path nor is it the lack of freedom. The problem is our innate desire to live along the edges, to gaze at the forbidden.


Just a couple of weeks after we started walking back in January, I had an accident. You need the back story. In January 2000 I fell on the slopes at Crested Butte and sustained a tibial plateau fracture. In other words, I broke my left leg just below the knee. Now, twelve years later, I still have a weak left leg and I don't trust my knee to hold up under much stress. Walking across uneven ground or not paying attention to the steps in front of me can get the best of me.


So we are walking before sunrise and a car comes up behind us. We move to the right edge of the road. I moved a little too far to the right and stepped on the edge of the asphalt - but with my right foot! My right ankle buckled and my left leg didn't hold me up. I fell, rolled like a good high school football player doing drills, and hopped up sorta quickly. Then I hobbled to the finish line. In a couple of days I was all better.


I fell because I got to close to the edge. Now I move to the edge of the road when a car comes toward us but I make sure I leave a little space between me and the edge of the pavement.


Living on the edge is dangerous. I'm all for pushing known boundaries to discover new and better ways of doing something. The technology I'm using to write this post exists because somebody pushed the limits. But we must be careful not to live on the edge of what God says is right. The divide between right and wrong may be hard to discern. You may misstep and wind up in the ditch.


Life after the Fall was different for Adam and Eve. Life after the fall in Crested Butte has been different for me. Let's guard ourselves - even when taking chances - to make sure we are safely within God's guidelines for living.