Granddaughter Kimberly thinks she owns my study. Just before her fifth birthday she came marching through one afternoon, in one door and headed out the other. I glanced up and almost lost it.
Duded up in her best western regalia, Kim had on her turquoise boots. With a red bandana around her neck and a hat with a leather-stitched brim tilted back on her head, she looked like she had stepped out of a Roy Rogers movie.
As she came through my study, Kim was humming a happy tune, caught up entirely in some private make-believe world. She didn’t seem to know I was around. What really broke me up was not her garb. It was her pet.
Somewhere in the catacombs of our church building Kim had unearthed a rubber rattlesnake I had used as a Garden of Eden Bible story prop many years ago. Around the witless creature’s neck she had tied a long piece of bright red yarn. As Kim came hop-scotching through my office that day, she had hold of that yarn and was dragging the moth-eaten serpent behind her.
“Only in West Texas,” I thought. “A cowgirl with a rattler on a leash!”
Genesis doesn’t tell us that the snake in Eden was a rattlesnake. If Texas is Paradise, like most Texans think it is, then it must have been a rattler. Right? Whatever kind he was, it’s a shame that Eve or somebody in that primeval glen didn’t have him on a leash. Instead, he took over the place.
One of my bright, sweet high school Bible students last spring included a delightful typo in her research paper. Without knowing the truth she wrote, she referred to Adam and Eve as “the first two inhibitors of the earth.” No doubt they deserve some of the blame, but the ancient serpent masterminded the whole nasty scheme.
“What really happened in Eden?” Cheryl Forbes asks in her Reluctant Pilgrim book. “What did Adam and Eve lose that we are seeking?”
Theologians can’t seem to agree on their answer to that question. They struggle with the apostle Paul’s assertion in Romans 5 that Jesus undid everything Adam did to us. The makers of dogmas are still fussing about what it was exactly that Adam imparted to us.
One thing seems obvious. When they locked the gates of Eden, we humans lost the unguarded innocence of a child like cowgirl Kim who, at her tender age, still has the snake on a leash.