Backyard Eden

Today we hosted our first Thanksgiving dinner.  Family members drove up from Florida to stay with us for a few days and we had a great meal this afternoon.  My favorite part was picking vegetables out of our own garden to cook for the meal.  C and I planted our vegetables shortly after moving here, and these two crops reached maturity in time for the feast:

Mustard Greens

Green Beans

I was so excited to pick them out of the garden!  We’ve been watching these guys grow in the hard Georgia clay, getting bigger every week despite my infrequent watering.  It was really amazing for me to see what creation will yield despite my amateur attempts to help.

On the other hand, it reached my soul in a very deep level to harvest and consume something I grew myself.  A fulfilling, deep joy, almost addictive, that makes me look forward to the spring when I can plant in earnest.

Little wonder I feel this way: we’ve been hard-wired since the very beginning to take care of the earth and live close to it.

Genesis 2:15 And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.

 

To dress it and to keep it: the Hebrew can be translated “to work in it and to protect it.”

Our work in the dirt is a mirror of God’s free, gracious attention to us dirty humans: he works in us, to improve us and increase our yield, and he protects us from danger.

The Dark Side

The Internet Has a Dark Side

On Friday NPR aired an interview with Leonard Kleinrock, the man who invented what would become the Internet on its 40th anniversary.  In the interview, Kleinrock expressed his surprise at how the network, originally trust-based and open, developed what NPR dubbed a “dark side.”

“[T]his open, trusted, available, shared environment, [was] the culture, the ethics of the early Internet. And then when we approach the late ’80s and the early ’90s and spam, and viruses, and pornography and eventually the identity theft and the fraud, and the botnets and the denial of service we see today[.]

Mr. Kleinrock’s innocence is charming, but I have to ask: What did he expect?  The internet was created and run by humans, who, as a general rule, will pervert everything they can to their own uses as soon as they can get away with it.  Look what we’ve done with our civil liberties.  How I mistreat the people closest to me.  How we crucified the one who came to save us from our sins.

When a close female relative of mine first got into gardening, she had very little success.  So little, in fact, that my brother and I joked that she had a “brown thumb” that killed everything she planted.

We’re all afflicted with a similar condition.  The power of self-improvement championed by Aristotle, the Renaissance and the Internet-bearing ’60s is an illusion.  We can’t do anything good on our own!  The more we try to improve our condition by our own power, through virtue, medicine, or the Internet, the more we’re tempted to forget how truly great is our need for grace.  In our self-embrace this Midas touch has begun to consume us, and against it all our striving would be losing without the incomparable grace of Christ.

And because of the unexpected, unsurpassed, unrequitable gift of God, we have hope far beyond our own power.

And so does my mom’s garden.

I am the vine, ye [are] the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. John 15:5