Plenteous

 "Employ the sickle, for the harvest is now ripe. Go, tread the grapes, for the winepress is indeed full. The vats overflow". Joel 3:13.

What makes us truly happy?

For many of us, it's perhaps memories of those all too brief moments when everything seemed just right with ourselves and the world - where good company or some truly satisfying achievement, or just a moment of deep serenity, marked a day as something very special. It's usually easy to tell such a moment, because it marks us deeply and stays with us for the rest of our days.

I had such a moment last summer. My best friend and my Brother were meeting me in London for a day together - the first time the three of us had met like this in almost a decade. It was great to spend the day enjoying so much, but what made it special more than anything else was the pleasure of each others company - it was wonderful for all of us to be together again.

In Genesis, we read the very same intention of the Lord with Adam and Eve. The place was rich with bounty, lush and sustaining, with literal wealth (precious jewels) flowing out from its four rivers into the world beyond, but what the Lord wanted more than anything else was to gently walk in this place in the cool of the day so He could converse with us and enjoy these marvels together.

Living is supposed to be about the wonder of such moments.

There's a wonderful concluding passage to Carl Sagan's best selling novel, Contact, in which the scientist Ellie Arroway is seeking to digest the final data on her cosmic experience of journeying across the universe -

"The universe was made on purpose. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover a miracle - another circle, drawn kilometres downstream from the decimal point. There would be richer messages further in. It doesn't matter what you look like, what you're made of or where you came from, as long as you live in the universe, and have a modest talent for maths, you would find it - it's already here. It's inside everything. You don't have to leave where you are to find it. In the very fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature. Standing over humans, gods, demons, subsuming caretakers and tunnel builders, there is an intelligence the antedates the universe.

The circle had closed. She had found what she had been searching for".

Life finds its deepest point when that 'signature' becomes personal to us.

Christianity is all about how God comes to bring us once more to walk with Him in the garden - to know a reality beyond all of our failures and flaws, where He raises us from our fallen realm into the joy of true friendship and companionship with Him and each other once again.

Eden restored.

That is the aim of it all.