Kim's Notebook

I have been thinking about Eve, the famous Eve from the book of Genesis, and after years of despising her, I’ve decided to cut her some slack.

Eve—wife of Adam, mother of Cain, Abel, and Seth—has been consuming my thoughts of late. It began a few weeks ago when I was driving to work and came upon a car with a license plate beginning with the letters EVE. What came to my mind first was Eve of the Bible. And my train of thought went like so: Eve, snake, apple, sin, pain and suffering.

I didn’t think much more of the license plate until a few days later when, on the same route, I found myself behind two cars with New York plates beginning in EVE. One of the cars was in my lane; one was in the next lane. That’s peculiar, I thought.

It was quite likely just a coincidence, but the part of me that likes to overthink began wondering if God was trying to send me a message—a message coming my way via New York license plates. I thought:

Does God want me to think about Eve? And if so, what about her? Since my childhood Sunday school lessons, I have disliked Eve. Somewhere along the way, I got it in my head that our world would be free of pain, sin, suffering, and all evil if Eve, weak-willed Eve, had not eaten fruit from the tree that God told her not to eat. Think about it. She had the beautiful Garden of Eden at her disposal, with everything she could want, and the one thing God tells her not to do—well, Eve goes off and does it, and drags poor Adam down with her. That thinking has stuck with me for years.

Back to those powerful license plates, I wondered:

Maybe God wants me to reread the Book of Genesis. I have not read it in many years, and maybe there’s a message in the story of Adam and Eve that God wants me to think about.

Or perhaps God is telling me that I’ve been behaving Eve-like. Oh gosh, am I that terrible? I thought. I didn’t like that possibility and quickly decided that God was not accusing me of acting like Eve.

I wondered if God was trying to warn me about snakes or “bad apples.”

Then my mind went to gardens, and I tried to figure out if there was a message there. For a few minutes I thought of the Garden of Eden and tried to imagine what it looked like all those hundreds of years ago. And then, on my earnest search for what God was trying to tell me, I recalled another garden, the one at Gethsemane, where Jesus spent time praying in his last hours before being seized by Roman soldiers.

It was thoughts of Gethsemane that brought to a stop my whirling thoughts. In the Bible, we read in a few passages where Jesus went off on his own to have quiet prayer with God. It is a wonderful lesson—taking time out of the day to talk with God—and one that I do not act on enough. My prayer life is not what I wish it would be, and I tend to blame my busy schedule. But as I thought of Jesus, I was reminded that if Jesus, whose job it was to save mankind, could find time in his day to connect with God, certainly I can.

As for Eve, I realized that I had to stop blaming her. After all, another of Jesus’s great lessons was forgiving others. And besides, Eve was only human.

I leave you with Matthew 26:36-38—Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.” He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him, and he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.”
—Kim Paras