A Garden to Work

Genesis 2:4-7

Do you ever wonder what a place looked like one hundred years ago?  At one time the King Ranch was my customer, and those I talked with would tell me that one hundred and forty-nine years earlier when Captain King came to this land it was void of bushes and the grass was as tall as the belly of a horse.  Often, I would stop on one of the Ranch roads and try to remove the abundance of mesquite trees that I was seeing, and imagine that land, as it was a hundred and forty-nine years earlier.

In Genesis 2 God is giving us a word picture of how it was before bushes; shall we take up the story in verse four, “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.  When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up – for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground – then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”  At this point in creation, the earth would not have any similarity to the earth we live on.

For three years, I’ve been unemployed by choice, many call this retirement, but I prefer to say, “I’m between jobs” and the pay was much better when I was employed.  As a person who is unemployed, I find I have the desire to work, it maybe cleaning house, or doing a small project, helping a neighbor, doing the yard, but this I know at the end of the day, I need to have worked in someway to have a feeling of value.  Why, because that is how mankind was designed, God’s design for man was to work in the garden.  A very wise king once wrote in Ecclesiastes 9:10, “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, (the grave) to which you are going.”  How things have changed, many today believe that work is a dirty word, they are too good to do the yard or house work, many guys I knew in sales were looking forward to becoming the boss, so that they no longer had to do the hard work of getting and keeping sales, they were always without exception the worst people to work under.  The apostle Paul, who loved to work, gave this advice; “He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with his own hands, that he may have something to share with those in need.” (Ephesians 4:28)  Paul is not just talking to the Congress of the United States; he is also talking to us who are “In between jobs”.

From the Back Porch,

Bob Rice