Lessons from the Garden

Every once in a great while I come across something so simple and brilliant and true I wish I’d written it myself. I didn’t, but I can do the next best thing, which is to share it with you. This very short story was written by Anne Herbert, who I’ve come to discover is the woman credited with coining the phrase “Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty.” Enjoy….

In the beginning, God didn’t make just two people: he made a bunch of us. Because he wanted us to have a lot of fun, and you can’t really have fun unless there’s a whole gang of you. He put us in Eden which was a combination garden and playground and park and told us to have fun.

At first we did have fun just like he expected. We rolled down the hills, waded in the streams, climbed on the trees, swung on the vines, ran in the meadows, frolicked in the woods, hid in the forest, and acted silly. We laughed a lot.

Then one day this snake told us that we weren’t having real fun because we weren’t keeping score. Back then, we didn’t know what score was. When he explained it, we still couldn’t see the fun. But he said we should give an apple to the person who was best at all the games and we’d never know who was best without keeping score. We could all see the fun of that, of course, because were were all sure we were the best.

It was different after that. We yelled a lot. We had to make up new scoring rules for most of the games. Others, like frolicking, we stopped playing because they were too hard to score.

By the time God found out what had happened we were spending about 45 minutes a day actually playing and the rest of the time working out scoring. God was wroth about that——very, very wroth. He said we couldn’t use his garden anymore because we weren’t having fun. We told him we were having lots of fun. He was just being narrow minded because it wasn’t exactly the kind of fun he originally thought of.

He wouldn’t listen.

He kicked us out, and he said we couldn’t come back until we stopped keeping score. To rub it in (to get our attention, he said), he told us we were all going to die and our scores wouldn’t mean anything anyway.

He was wrong. My cumulative, all-game score now is 16,548 and that means a lot to me. If I can raise it to 20,000 before I die, I’ll know I’ve accomplished something. Even if I can’t my life has a great deal of meaning because I’ve taught my children to score high and they’ll be able to reach 20,000 or even 30,000.

Really, it was life in the garden that didn’t mean anything. Fun is great in its place but without scoring there’s no reason for it. God actually has a very superficial view of life and I’m certainly glad my children are being raised away from his influence. We were lucky. We’re all very grateful to the snake.

(excerpted from “The Opposite of Sin is Love” by Carl Skrade)