Home to Eden

Some places never cease to exist.  Some places always seem to be known by the name of someone from long ago.  My mother's home place was located out in the country and was accessible only by a series of dirt roads.  I grew up calling it the old home place.  Some years ago I went back down those dirt roads looking for it only to find nothing except pine trees.  It was gone.  There was no sign of the place where my mother and her eight siblings grew up. 

 

Not long ago while exchanging some emails with a distant relative who still lives in the area, she told me the old home place had been sold several times and one of her family now owned it.  What was interesting was the fact that she spoke of it not just your home place, but the Hale home place which was my mother's maiden name.  No one from my family has lived there in such a long time, but still it is known in such a way.  It is the same in these parts.  Places still go by the name of some previous owner even though the house and land has changed hands several times. 

 

I wonder if in the mind and heart of God there is a place on which He looks and thinks, "Eden...once I walked there."  After that evening when the Garden of Eden couple hid from the Lord God because of their sin, the Word says, "...therefore the Lord God sent him (Adam) from the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken.  He drove out the man..."  (Genesis 3:23-24)  The story says nothing about the Garden being destroyed.  It was just no longer accessible to the ones who had known it as home.  It was a home not defined so much by geography as a home defined by a spiritual oneness with the Creator of the Garden and all the rest of creation.  And, so it is that we are all searching for the way home to Eden, the place where we first knew a spiritual oneness with our Creator.