I couldn't believe my eyes. There it was, staring back at me from the twelve-items-or-less-lane. Perched in its usual spot, between the T.V. Guide and the National Enquirer, two racks above the Raisinets and Rolaids, was this week's edition of the Weekly World News (official motto: "The World's Only Reliable Newspaper"). The amazing thing about this particular edition was the headline. There it was in huge, urgent, earnest-looking letters: "GARDEN OF EDEN FOUND."

Needless to say, I did what any serious theologian would do; I moved into the express lane and purchased a copy of this stunning report. According to the article, soldiers on patrol in Iraq had stumbled across an ancient tree near Baghdad. Upon careful inspection they found, and I quote, "the skeletal remains of a large snake" and "a petrified apple . . . [that] looked as though two bites had been taken from it."1 But wait. There's more. While retrieving the apple, the soldiers glimpsed the ghostly form of a woman whom they tentatively identified as Eve! The report concluded with the promise that the Weekly World News would keep us informed of any further developments.

But, alas, no further developments have been forthcoming. Indeed, Weekly World News headlines notwithstanding, there haven't been any further developments coming out of Eden for a long, long time. Ever since the gate closed behind Adam and Eve, Eden has been over. The gate is closed for good, and Eden is over forever. There is no going back to the perfect peace, security, joy, and innocence of Eden. Life has unfolded; time has moved on. Like Adam and Eve before us, we have all made choices and decisions that have left life less than perfect. Add to that life's natural losses and inevitable disappointments, and what you have is something other than Eden. Eden's gate is closed, and Eden's garden is gone. Too much is too over. We can't undo or take back or have back anything. We can only adjust to life as it is and seek, with the help of God, to live life after Eden as fully and faithfully as we can, because Eden will always be closed.

Which is why Gethsemane will always be open. If we can't find our way back to the garden of Eden, the only other garden to go to is Gethsemane. If we can't have the perfect peace and security of Eden, then we'll have to adjust to life as it is, come to terms with life outside of Eden, and trust God to help us live life fully and faithfully no matter what we have to face or bear. And that, of course, is where the other garden, Gethsemane, comes in.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record Jesus' visit to the garden of Gethsemane on the night before he died. Once he arrived in Gethsemane, Jesus began praying for things to change: "And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed, 'My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want" (Matt 26:39). Jesus started out in Gethsemane praying for things to change, praying to be spared from the dreadful thing he was facing. Matthew 26:38-39 describes the depth of Jesus' sorrow: "Then he said to them, 'I am deeply grieved, even to death.' . . . And going a little farther he threw himself on the ground and prayed." Luke's Gospel reports that Jesus' anguish in Gethsemane was so intense that "His sweat became like great drops of blood" (Luke 22:44). Mark's record of that same night says Jesus was "distressed and agitated" (Mark 14:33). It is obvious that Jesus went to Gethsemane to pray as hard as a person can pray to be spared, to be delivered. Grieved to death, distressed, throwing himself to the ground, Jesus prayed with all his heart for God to remove the bitter cup he was about to drink.

But at some point during his visit to Gethsemane, Jesus adjusted his praying. His prayers moved from asking for things to change to accepting what he had to face. You can see it best in Matthew's account. In Matthew 26:39, Jesus prays, "My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want." Then, a little later, in Matthew 26:42, Jesus' prayer has moved from asking for things to change to accepting what cannot be changed: "My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done." Jesus knows that the only way out is through the pain. He came to Gethsemane praying for God to get him around the awful pain, but he leaves Gethsemane trusting God to get him through the awful pain. In Gethsemane, Jesus' prayer moved from asking for things to change--"Take this cup from me"--to accepting what could not be changed--"If this cup cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done."

Sooner or later, we all end up with Jesus, on our knees in Gethsemane, praying for God to get us around something we must go through. Like Jesus in Gethsemane, we pray that something will happen to spare us from the worst possible outcome and deliver us from the most awful darkness, sorrow, loss, and pain. If things always worked out that way, if we were given absolute immunity from heartbreak and protection from sorrow, I guess we'd be back in Eden. But Eden is over. That garden is gone. All that's left is Gethsemane, the garden where we go to adjust, to accept the realities we face, to come to terms with what we must go through because we can't get around it. In November 1993, we learned that my father had a "spot on his liver." We all prayed as hard as we could that the spot would be benign. Then the biopsy results came back, and we had to adjust, praying instead that the cancer would be removable. When the surgery didn't work, we adjusted again and prayed that chemotherapy would help. When the chemotherapy failed, we adjusted our prayers to ask for Daddy to be comfortable. And at the end, we adjusted our prayers once more to pray that he would die peacefully. Sometimes, that's the way prayer moves. Sometimes prayer changes our lives, and sometimes life changes our prayers. Sometimes prayer changes the direction in which life is going, but sometimes prayer can only keep moving in an effort to catch up to life. Sooner or later we all find ourselves in Gethsemane. We start out praying for everything to be fine, and we end up coming to terms with what we must face, accepting realities we cannot change; adjusting, adjusting, adjusting.

Life is what it is, and it isn't Eden. That garden is gone. Life is frequently wonderful, often joyful, and usually good, but life is also sometimes painful, occasionally difficult, and at times heartbreaking. And all the praying in the world sometimes doesn't spare us from having to go through struggles we never imagined we would have to face. The poet Wendell Berry once wisely wrote, "We live the given life, not the planned." It's true. We can plan life as carefully as we please, but ultimately we live life in the shade of an if-shaped shadow. "If all goes well, we plan to do this. If we stay healthy, we hope to go there. If everything goes according to plan, we hope to do that." We live our lives in the hope-colored shade of an if-shaped shadow. The life we actually live is whatever life is given to us, which may or may not be the life we had planned. There will always be unwanted cups to drink and unplanned adjustments to make.

All of that is clear-eyed realism, and it is all true. But there is more to life than clear-eyed realism; there is also wide-eyed hope. After all, remember what happened to Jesus after he left Gethsemane. The bitter cup he dreaded turned out to be every bit as bad as he feared. His pain was awful. His suffering was terrible. And he died. But tragedy and death did not have the last word. The last word belonged to God. When God raised Jesus from the grave, God brought unimaginable joy, goodness, and triumph from unspeakable pain, sorrow, and loss.

And ever since, whenever anything has looked like a total loss and a terrible end, people have had to adjust their thinking to make room for hope.

Amen.