Check this out, might be interesting to let this influence our Freedom conversations at least within ourselves in relation to the Garden.  Are we brave enough to take this kind of thinking outside of ourselves ?

As you know, the next few chapters after the fall, scripture points out all the evils that came to man and we see this as the sin that was brought into the world but yet this guys is saying something very different.   Outside of the Garden was the place where a different kind of time took place.  Adam and Eve were strategically placed in a better, safer place than the perfect place of the Garden for redemption, wholeness to occur.  Well to me that is so bizarre, I am having a hard time seeing love in that but yet… I trust it, it resonates with our circumstances and gives the only possible answer to why me Lord ???  Why my daughter, my wife ??????????????????????????????????

Think of what is being demanded of Leisha and I being stuck in the process (time) its taking to restore Claire.  I just held Leisha for the umpteenth time this morning as she wetted my shirt  due to her ubber empathic mothering heart taking over and she was being crushed by what she knows and what she sees her daughter has to go through.  The re-occuring theme around here is Claire is going through things like Leisha did in her early woman years with Severe Rheumatoid Arthritis.  At least 6 times in the last week Leisha has fallen into my arms and I mean ‘Fall Hard’ sobbing and saying over and over I don’t want my daughter to go through what I went through but yet….  This answers Claire’s question to me or really more a statement:  Daddy, this is to me like moms Rheumatoid Arthritis, this might not go away, right ?  Yes Claire, I don’t understand it but yes that is a possibility.

Think of your most difficult struggles !!!

Look at Jesus’s answer to John the Baptist in prison about to get his head cut off, there was something better in leaving John in his demise than taking him out of that very evil and dark situation.  God does see ‘Troubles’ so differently than we do.  He is a Father too and he has more Love for my daughter than my painful love but he leaves us, her, you there in these crushing places without really giving us clear ‘Reasons Why?’  But yet here is the answer.  Redemptive, linear, chronological time where burning fires test (pull out impurities).  Leaves us in places where after sometime we will begin to ask the most important questions we could ever ask about everything.  Then often is silent through the lack of change or healing to get us to a place to force us into a position of the heart to ask with a little more seriousness.  Then might even do that again…  And maybe several more times within the linear time of … years.

I believe this God of the Bible plays with time and pain much differently than we really want to accept.

My point ? If we will take our eyes off of what traditional theology tells us and see what the Genesis story might be saying, see it differently, we might see the abundant life is by design a place where severe troubles WILL exist.  That By Design the Freedom Journey is about you becoming who God called you to be within the midst of your circumstances, its somehow living free inside of the prison cell even if the bars have been removed like Paul and Silas did.  It’s often finding yourself in the Garden of Gethsemane crying out in-spite of all of your manliness and your ubber self sufficiency…  Father will you take this cup from me isn’t there another way ????????????  And all you get back is this is my son in whom I am well pleased.

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REDEMPTIVE TIME

The first couple existed in eternity with God in the Garden of Eden. There was no such thing as evil, or at least Adam and Eve did not know what evil was. Things were all good.

The Bible tells us that God “made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food.”But in the middle of the garden were two significant trees: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God told Adam he was free to eat from any tree in the garden except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

But Adam and Eve did not listen. They ate fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and something terrible happened. For the first time, things were no longer “all good.” Humankind “knew” both good and evil. The Hebrew word for know here is the same word that Scripture uses when it says that Adam “knew” Eve in the sexual sense (Gen. 4:1 KJV). It refers to the total experience of knowing. This experience of knowing evil—and therefore pain—is what God had tried to protect people from. He knew that it would hurt.

Nevertheless, Eve was deceived by Satan. Satan held out the apple of omniscience and wisdom (Gen. 3:6), and the first couple received evil and pain.

Imagine, for a moment, the situation. God had created a perfect place with perfect creatures to live in eternity. And, suddenly, evil arrived on the scene. What did God do?

God said, “‘The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.’ So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life” (Gen. 3:23–24).

God moved immediately to protect humankind from being in a state of eternal isolation, experiencing pain for a very long time. To protect Adam and Eve from eternal pain, he drove them out of eternity, guarded eternity with a cherubim, and sent them to a new place called redemptive time, where we live now. Here God could fix the problem; he could undo the effects of the fall. He could redeem his creation, and then bring humankind back into eternity after it was again holy and blameless.

What an awesome plan! He even gives a clue in Genesis 3:15 about how he would accomplish this: The woman’s offspring would eventually crush the serpent’s head, a promise fulfilled in Christ’s victory over Satan. No wonder the writer of Hebrews calls it “so great a salvation.” God not only kept us from eating from the tree that would have thrust us into eternal pain, he drove us into a place where he would have the time to fix us and bring us back into relationship with him!

Philosophers and physicists have for centuries debated the nature of time, but for our purpose, let’s define redemptive time as “an incubator that exists for the purpose of redemption.” It is a place where God can lovingly fix what is wrong. It is a place where evil temporarily exists while God does his work.

Think of it another way. God has a sick creation. He needs to do surgery. Thus, he places us in the operating room of redemptive time. Into our veins he pumps the life-giving blood of grace and truth. During surgery, he excises evil and brings the renewed patient back into eternity in a holy state. We don’t know how long this surgery will last. We only know that we are expected to participate actively in our own surgery, and we don’t get any anesthesia for the procedure. That’s why growing up into the image of God often hurts so much.

Redemptive time, an essential ingredient to growth, will not last forever. Paul says that we need to make the best possible use of time, for we don’t have much: “Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise, but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil” (Eph. 5:15–16). Scripture tells us that God will at some point put an end to this redemptive time and usher in the return of eternity. ^[1]

^[1] Cloud, H. (2009). Changes that heal: the four shifts that make everything better…and that everyone can do. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

We are all in process, saint and sinner alike and in-fact everything is in process. That is a reality we cannot change, but we can choose or manage our perspectives.

There is the idea of destination or the plural form of that, destinations and that is a fact of life but destination is just a milestone within the bigger thing going on of process.  When we arrive there is more to go, virtually almost always!

The other day Leisha overheard our neighbor comment on our dead Bald Cypress, basically it just needed to go since it was showing no life.  We had two of these in our front yard in Fort Worth and we have this one in this house because both Leisha and I just loved those two.  So near 22 years and yes every year they turn orange, shed all of their leaves and yes cover large portions of our yard in orange.  We happen to like it, Leisha loves it, both of us giggle with glee at the knees that show up in our yard. We see the knees as unique and unusual attributes of this kind of tree.  We tend to like things and people that are different.  We see it as a process or in process,  it’s just another phase of its life.  Our neighbors daughter only saw death.  I guess she thought it was an evergreen.

We are a little west of its natural range but only by a couple of hundred miles or so and they seem to thrive under our care.  These things can get HUGE, 140 feet !!!  They can live a long time, some have been found to be near 500 years old and forest of them in the US 1400 hundred years old.  I don’t expect ours to get that big our live that long but it will get as big as we want and outlive us.  Also, these big boys are a great way to add fall color in North Texas.  Just look at those vibrant orange colors all over the place !!!

Did you catch that? A different perspective can change everything about something or someone’s value and its actual place in its/their own process…  Isn’t perspective within our own control and isn’t there an inherent sense of responsibility ? 

We are like that with ourselves and others in de-valuing ‘us’.  We see death or lack of worth where there might be life and value.  At worse we can see an end of things where its just another season, maybe one of many more to come.  But the Ancient One doesn’t see things this way and most especially us.  He sees process and value and he sees what comes after this season no matter how difficult it may be.  After all he has been watching us, planning on things for us, waiting on us to get over ourselves for a long long time.  I don’t think he really likes having to let us have ‘troubles’ to help us get to where we need to be but what can a Father do?

Father thank you for this long difficult season that helped me so much in understanding more about this.  Thank you for loving me through my own often self imposed difficulties.  Most especially where I made things worse because I demanded things to be over, had an attitude because I knew things shouldn’t have taken so long. I doubted you, your ways, your infinite wisdom.  Thank you for gingerly getting me into this new way of seeing myself and others.  I see Love in you having been there and more and more I trust you will always be.  Thank you for ‘The Process’