How We Were Meant to Live

As a child, I always anticipated a camping trip. I have memories of shivering in my sleeping bag and trying to decide whether it was worth it to throw off my blanket and make a run for the bathhouse. I also remember cooking the best corn and beans over our campfire and never leaving the campsite without making a few new friends.

Recently, I again was able to spend a few nights in the great outdoors. I was with a group, and one morning as we prepared our humble breakfast, one of the girls remarked to me, “Isn’t it great to live as God intended?”

“Well,” I answered, “we can live every day as God intended.”

What I meant was not that God intended the world as we experience it—with sin, suffering, and pain—but rather that He intended for us to live with and for Him. In beauty. In the Garden He created, perfectly, where everything was good. We’re the ones who broke it.

As the prophets foretold, “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel,” meaning “God with us” (Matt. 1:23). God’s intention was and is still that He live with us, and we with Him through Jesus, the Life (Jn. 14:6). We messed up. We crossed the line. God’s response? Mercy.

I love the outdoors. Nature itself is one of God’s good gifts. It can soothe and inspire and point us to God and draw us out of our own little world. I think of how we were created—in a garden. Working in the dirt with our hands. Giving the animals names. In nature, we’re in our element.

At the same time, the human problem is not suburbia or materialism or pollution or concrete or drafty apartments but sin. Misdiagnosing the problem, seeing the human creature through a mechanistic lens, or viewing the city-dweller as merely an organism deficient in sunlight will not lead to a lasting solution or one that spiritually satisfies.

True salvation and restoration are found in the “righteous Branch, the King who will reign wisely and do what is just and right in the land” (Jer. 23:5), the true Vine (Jn. 15:1). Leisure and taking time to breathe the fresh air can do wonders. We have a human need for rest. But camping is hardly a taste of the Garden of Eden. Living with God is how we were meant to live, which we can now do through Christ.