Our home group has slowly been working our way through a particular book – Becoming a True Spiritual Community. This book is by one of my favourite authors, Larry Crabb.
I thought I would post some words that I read just the other night from this book:
When God first created people, He placed them in a garden, the biblical symbol of God’s presence” where He is loved and desired above all else” [quoting James Houston in The Heart’s Desire]. And He named the garden Eden, a word that means delight in the sense of erotic rapture.
When I ponder the significance of God placing Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and not in a university library or a business board room something stirs in me.
For me, these thoughts are stirring and refreshing. I can so often go into management mode and so often get caught up in the academia of study and scholarship. There is nothing inherently wrong with either of those, per se. But when they take over, becoming our main mode of operation, we dearly miss what God really intended.
Is it not interesting that God placed Adam and Eve within a garden, which Crabb reminds us this points to the presence of God, even where He walked with them in the cool of the day? His intent was not to first and foremost deem them managers or theologians, but rather relational beings called into relationship with Him and one another, enjoying the presence of Him and one another.
Such a reminder draws me in to the heart of God even more.
The Prodigal Thought 
Scott, I often think of this ‘garden’ that is spoken of in the quote above. I take the creation garden story as ‘mythic’ in character- God’s way of helping us see forward into his intent for life, forward to how we come to know our experience on this earth once we’ve become reconciled to our God through Jesus.
Yes, God did place us in a garden. When we come to Jesus and are reconciled to our Creator, we find we are in an edenic garden (all things have become new). For those who know God, the whole earth has become the Garden of Eden where we walk in communion with our God and live as managers of his resources. And now, even in board rooms and libraries we can feel the Eden flow of life. Thorn and thistles aside, it is good to be human and to love him and desire him above all else.