Our world Broken and Beautiful

One of the reasons my belief that the Bible could hold answers for me, began with question I had rolling around in my head since I was a kid.

Much like the previous blog entry, I asked myself… how can the world be so beautiful and terrible at the same time?

As a little girl I often rode my bike around where I lived observing the beauty in nature and would spend a lot of time at the beach soaking up the salt air while studying the amazing changes the ocean wrought depending on seasons, wind changes and light. I loved cartoons, yummy food and playing with my sisters. But occasionally this lovely world would have shadows.

My parents would fight. I’d get sick or one of my sisters might hit me. Nothing out of the ordinary but I’d wonder why can’t things be nice all the time?

...these things happened

A flood happened in my street when I was 11 and I watched my world alter in a matter of hours. The teenage boy who lived across the street died in a motorbike accident one day - and I couldn’t understand how that could happen. I read the diary of Ann Frank and suddenly I perceived “badness” on a scale I’d never dreamed of. That a girl my age, could be carted off in a train and sent to a concentration camp to die. It seemed inconceivable that humans could do this.

So began my grapple with the paradox. How could this amazing beautiful earth, filled with so much goodness, love, fun and wonder also be a place of pain, hurt and conflict? I thought all this as I too battled with losing my own temper at times and hurting others, or lying and stealing occasionally as a teenager to get the things I wanted. Wasn’t I a negative part of it all too?

Having no religious or Christian background I wondered about the story of Adam and Eve. Like most people it seemed like a fairy tale and not really anything I’d taken seriously. I figured there may have been an original man and woman at the start of the world but not sure what happened, if they evolved or just were put there by God.

But what made some kind of sense to me was the idea of the Garden of Eden. I remember my sister had a record of Joni Mitchell and she played this idealistic hippy song in which the chorus sang   “…and we got to get ourselves back to the garden”…. (Metaphorically speaking of course)…  Even as a young teen I got what she was saying, we need to live a pure and good life.

If only!

The older I got the more confused I felt about the world.

Love was hard, it was messy and I struggled coming to terms with how awful people could be. I couldn’t understand bigger problems like poverty, cancer, unemployment and war. They perplexed me.

The idea of this “Garden” in the book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible… captured my attention.   God initially creating a perfect world where there was no conflict, illness or decay sparked my imagination  of the way the world could have been. That beautiful planet with oceans, trees, peace and goodness -   A world I sometimes glimpsed in my everyday life…  but was now also polluted with crappy stuff.

Eden - A “perfect world” with its self perpetuating garden and landscape so rich it grew everything without toil, animals and people lived in the same space, no death or sickness and a place where God walked with people. But wait...!! It all crashed and burned somehow, and war began, someone started killing, cells died and weeds grew.
That pretty much describes life today.

The first people whom God apparently created - were  requested not to cross his boundary (and eat of the tree of good and evil)  but they decided to cross it. God warned, “If you do this, if you choose to go against me in this you’ll end up dying”. And they did… and now we do and so forth. 
They opened this world to a force called sin.

What strikes me I guess as having some sort of relevance in my world, is that I can imagine this place of Eden when this planet earth in a perfect state, and when I cannot understand what went wrong its design - even if it was an evolutionized world - when I can't explain how civilization and it's inhabitants became so malfunctioning - that the very potential for world peace, wellness, happiness and health now seems impossible to attain.

They say when Adam and Eve broke God’s command and sin came into the world, much like a storm breaking into a perfect day, the ruinous aspect of sin permeating every spectre of life and our history. War, sickness, addictions, injustice, slavery, pollution and the list goes on. These are all because of this sin-infiltrating force in life, of evil that co-exists with this creation of beauty  - and to me that makes some kind of sense.

This amazing world should have been beautiful, we shouldn’t kill each other, we should not wreck the environment and disease shouldn’t occur - people shouldn't be starving or morbidly obese -  But it all does occur and I wanted to know when I was 14 years old why why why? What is the reason civilization and our planet fails so much - can't get it right?

Is it that people are so evil, or that God doesn’t exist or care? Is it that evolution is misfiring and we are not evolving at all? - The Genesis story seems to fit this "once perfect now polluted profile". A created environment with sin seeping in and around it over centuries and this to me seems a tangible explanation of what went wrong. It was perfect but became imperfect somewhere.. still beautiful, still full of love, goodness and wonder.. but broken.

I see evidence of this I suppose in my own character. The Bible says we are inherent with sin because of what human kind began in their DNA in the beginning. We can be wonderful and cruel ourselves. We can be kind in one breath and slander in another. If we are honest with ourselves we know that we too are beautiuful and broken.

I wish it was always beautiful … I wish the world didn’t suffer in ways I feel powerless to overcome, even in smaller places like where I work. A hospital ward, where patients have cancer, a work environment where co-workers get annoyed with each other, a week of work where my body tires and ages. My own small world is full of bad things and so much beauty as well.

Does it make any sense to you? That sin may be the reason life sucks sometimes? That there is evil and imperfection that happened in the human race and environment which changed what could have been an amazingly perfect world?

If we start to apply the idea of sin to real life we can find a step toward God and what he offers as an anecdote to sin in our own lives personally. For me it was a hunger to know… how I deal with the problem of sin, of evil, of crappy stuff that I couldn’t make sense of and that makes me feel despair.

When I pushed my mind back to an idea of Eden, when I could clearly see glimpses of beauty and perfection of Gods original plan and how that original plan was ruined, but still functioning, I didn’t feel so powerless or helpless. If this God story, this Genesis story was actually true and God put it there for us to read and understand then surely he would help us in the here and now to deal with it. And once we consider this,  the whole reason of why this Jesus came actually makes sense.

If we don’t believe that sin entered an originally perfect world with plans only for life, life and more life, if we just put it down to nature, human or otherwise, then we have no anecdote. We haven’t a lot of hope but to do our best in this life and fingers crossed if or if not there is more to be had. We can’t make sense if our mum’s get cancer or we lose our job, or we get wrinkles. We just go with it. But in God’s Genesis explanation we are offered a reason… and a promise for something more...

We dont just accept the brokenness and the fact we are part of that dying process.


Jesus says he came to give us eternal life, and be sin in our stead. To remove it's power over us forever.

keeps me leaning to Him to find out why...

That's my thoughts anyway.

all photo's by me - enjoy