Chapter Three
I had grown up in a very ordered house, with a scheduled routine. Every day, with the exception of the seventh day, followed the same pattern from the time we rose until we went to bed at night.
My family broke our fast in the morning after we awoke at sunrise. We sat together at the table to eat as a family, and my mother would put out what I now realized was a feast. Most mornings we would have eggs. Sometimes they would be plain, other days cooked with vegetables or cheese. With the eggs we would always have bread with butter or honey, milk and fresh fruit. We often had warm cereal made from grain harvested from my fields. We would mix the cereal with honey and milk to make a delicious dish.
After the breakfast meal we would clean the table, kitchen and house as was needed. We would then wash ourselves to get ready for the day, cleaning our teeth, face and hands, before going out to our work.
The morning was spent working alone in our area of specialization. The afternoon was used to do our communal work, where we would help each other on whatever job had need of an extra set or two of hands.
When my brother and I were children our chores had varied as our parents taught us to do all the tasks that were required to support the family. As we had grown to adulthood we had moved towards working in the areas that we most preferred. He loved working with animals and preferred a slow pace. He liked to have lots of time to sit, think and sing. For years now he had taken care of our flocks. I wanted to work hard and see the fruits of my labor grow before my eyes. I loved to work with plants and was responsible for growing all our field crops. I provided most of our family's food.
My father took care of our orchards, and he could build or fix anything. He was quite ingenious and had made everything we needed to have a very comfortable life. We had a table with chairs for eating our meals, and we had soft beds to sleep in. There were shelves and cabinets for storing food and cooking tools in the house. My father had even diverted a stream so the water ran right behind our home. We did not need to walk far to get water to drink, cook or wash with.
My mother was in charge of our household. She cooked our meals, made our clothes, and took care of the house, whether it was cleaning it herself or telling us what to do. She was also in charge of the herb garden, where she grew the many herbs she used in her cooking. Though it was a very rare occasion when one of us did not feel well, she also grew special herbs which could be used to treat our family for illness or injury.
After breakfast and cleaning up, I would be able to go out to my fields to work for the morning. I loved the time I was able to spend there alone, with no one to bother me. Depending upon the season and what had to be done with my crops, I would at times need help from my family in the afternoons. Planting season was difficult and time consuming and I always needed assistance in the spring, but during the growing season and the quiet fallow season the pace was more relaxed and I needed no help at all.
Harvest was an especially hectic time, when many hands were needed to bring the grain in. Harvesting the fields of grain was a lot of hard work, and it had to be done quickly lest you lost the seed off the stalk. The more hands the better in order to complete the harvest as swiftly as possible. I was able to harvest all the fruits and vegetables myself, as they had a slower paced growing pattern and they yielded their produce over a longer period of time.
My mornings were spent in solitary work; hoeing, watering, spreading manure, harvesting what could be taken. This was my time alone, when I could work and not have to interact with my family. I did not like to sit around and think and talk as the rest of my family always wanted to do; I needed to be active.
By the time I left home I had come to the point where I often did not want to speak with my parents. They enjoyed giving me counsel in areas where I had no need, and I would get frustrated and angry with them. It seemed that the older I became, the more they told me how they thought I should think and act in my life.
On different occasions my parents had said I needed to be less arrogant, especially with my brother, that I needed to be more giving in my worship of God, and even that I needed to think less of myself and more of the family. They actually told me they thought I was selfish!
I hated that they seemed to think so little of me. I was not arrogant with my brother, though I did believe him to be simple in his outlook on life. I did not feel the need to be more giving to God. My giving was sufficient. Everything I grew was because of my hard work and intellect, not His. As for selfish, since I produced almost all our food, I believed I was generous to share everything with my family.
I believed my family needed to think more highly of me and be more grateful. I provided our abundant food. They should have been respectful and impressed by what I did. Without me they would not have eaten nearly so well.
My brother was just as bad as my parents, if not worse. Though he was younger than me, he felt he had the right to give me his opinion on how I should live my life. I was especially bothered by his superior attitude regarding his relationship with God.
For some reason he thought he knew better than me how to worship God. He would constantly tell me how I should praise God more, and give God the glory for the success I had in my own fields raising my crops.
This infuriated me. He just sat around all day watching his sheep, singing, and as he liked to say, praising God. While my brother played around like this, I, not God, had real work to do in my fields raising the food our family ate. I, not God, deserved the glory.
When the sun started to drop in the sky my father would blow a horn to signal our afternoon rest, which we took during the heat of the day. This would not be a long break, just enough time for us to regain our energy while the sun dropped a bit lower in the sky. The rest time would be followed by our afternoon meal.
After a morning of hard work in the sun, I was always ready for both the rest and the repast. Dinner was taken in the same manner as the morning meal. We would gather around the table to eat that which my mother had prepared.
We would always have bread and cheese, and there would be butter or olive oil with herbs to go with the bread. From my fields we would have various raw vegetables such as lettuce, tomatoes and peppers, as well as wonderful soups or stews made with beans, potatoes and vegetables. The food was always delicious and filling.
We would finish the meal with our choice of the many fruits we grew, such as strawberries, apples, melon or citrus. In addition, to quench our thirst we would have water, milk or juice squeezed from fruit.
While we were eating, we would discuss what we had accomplished that morning and what was still to be done. After talking over our morning work and whether any of us had need of help that afternoon, my father would decide what project to work on for the rest of the day.
The afternoon was the time for the large jobs that had to be done. These projects would sometimes take many days to complete, but together we would build a new structure to store grain or keep animals in, a fence for livestock or a trench for irrigation in the fields. There was always plenty to be done, and these projects could be completed more quickly with all of us working together.
Though the work was often tedious, I took pleasure in being able to form things with my hands. The creation of items for the house was my father’s primary job, but on occasion my brother and I would help him make furniture or other small household items, such as the utensils that we would eat or cook with. These household objects were fashioned from wood and sometimes stone, and all of them were shaped by tools which my father had devised and built.
I enjoyed turning the wood and stone into beautiful, functional objects almost as much as I enjoyed working in my fields.
Following the afternoon meal, the men would go out to work on whatever project my father had decided upon. Though sometimes mother would need to help us, she normally stayed at the house and worked outside in either her kitchen or herb garden, or inside the house cleaning, making cloth on her loom, or sewing. If she felt
the desire, she would sometimes spend time in the afternoon creating a drawing or painting.
When darkness came we would all be back at our house, where we would wash the dirt and sweat from our bodies and join together to converse for a time with candles lit before going to our rooms for the nights rest.
Every day was much like the day before, with little variation in what we ate, our work, the time we rose and the time we slept. There was a sameness about everything my family did, even the things that we spoke of, which I found tedious. Nothing ever seemed to change or happen, and I could foresee my life going on like this forever.
On the seventh day we would rest from our labors. This was a practice my father had taken from God, who had created the heavens and earth in six days and rested on the seventh.
The one thing my parents were willing to speak of from their past was their relationship with God. They told me and my brother that in the beginning they had lived in a garden where their life was wonderful and filled with peace. In this garden they had somehow known God personally; they said they actually spoke with Him. At the time I found this ridiculous and hadn't really believed them. How could they know and speak with the Creator of the world?
Something had happened to my parents; something that forced them to move to our homeland and fundamentally changed their relationship with God. According to them someone they named the Deceiver had lied and caused them to do something which made God sever their close relationship, changing it radically. This change was not my parents’ desire and caused them great sadness.
Now, instead of being close to God physically and emotionally like my parents said they originally were, we worshiped Him from a distance. This fundamental change in their relationship with God caused my parents great pain, and the separation also seemed to bother my brother. I really couldn’t understand their problem with this arrangement, as I had no real desire to know God personally.
My mother and father liked to call our family people of God. They told me and my brother that they were created by God to be a blessing to Him, to be righteous and do His will. They said we were created in God’s image; that we were able to reason and make choices, to think and act righteously like God if we had the strength of will and chose to do so.
Our parents were insistent that we never listen to the Deceiver. They said he no longer walked the earth as he had when he first deceived them. Now he was the voice within us which tried to sway us to do wrong, just as God was the voice within that wanted us to do good. My parents told us that God had given us free will, and He left it to every person to make their own decisions as to how they would live their life.
Other than these things of God, my parents would not talk about their past. They would not tell us what it was like in the beginning, about their original home, or why they had to leave.
My father told us resting on the seventh day was a way of honoring God and His power. He said God wanted us to take time to contemplate Him and also relax; that He wanted us to enjoy the beauty of the world around us and do what we enjoyed without feeling guilty about taking time away from our work.
It was on rest days that my father would construct things for pleasure. He had made my knife over the course of several rest days, carefully shaping the blade and then carving the handle to fit me perfectly.
He carved a flowing guard into the hard wood, and the end of the handle was shaped into an ornate circular design like the inside of a shell curling in upon itself around the large, deep red stone. It was such a beautiful knife that for the longest time I would not use it for fear of damaging it in some way. My father had finally found it necessary to talk with me to convince me to use the knife. I consider the lesson he taught me that day to be one of the most important I ever learned, and I have tried to keep it central to my life.
Father said everything that exists on the face of the earth was put there for God’s purposes, whether it was created through the hand of man or by God Himself. Everything in existence, from our human minds and bodies to our talents, abilities and our man-made tools, is from God. Anything which is not used by man to its absolute fullest potential is not serving the purpose for which God put it on the earth. To not reach, or not be allowed to reach your full potential is worse than to not be created at all, for by this you fail both God and man.
It was on rest days that my mother would create her most beautiful paintings. My father had devised an ingenious construction for her to paint upon. He would take the skin of a sheep, clean it and allow it to dry almost completely. He would work the skin to keep it flexible as it dried, and finally he would stretch it over a square wooden frame and let it dry fully.
My mother would then take this smooth skin, and paint upon it with every color. She made these paints herself by mixing various elements she grew or found in nature. She created the most wonderful paintings, mainly of flowers and her gardens, though she also painted scenes of the forests, mountains and meadows, often with animals in them.
My parents spent much of their time together on the days of rest, often just walking through the forests and meadows. They always seemed happiest when they were alone with each other.
My brother wasted most of his free time, as far as I was concerned. He would sometimes spend an entire day making a musical instrument, usually simple flutes or pipes which he fashioned from reeds. He also tried to construct very complicated stringed instruments which he would work at for many days, but he could never seem to get them quite right.
While he was able to find a way of making the strings out of animal parts and the bodies were carved and shaped out of wood, the way of adjusting the strings to create the exact sound he wanted eluded him. He continued trying though, and he used his flutes to create tunes which he played as he watched his flocks in the meadows.
He would make up songs which he sang to our parents in the evenings. They loved these songs, and praised him for the beauty and poetry which they heard in them. They were often songs about the glory and power of God. My brother always said God’s glory was revealed in everything he saw in the world. These sentiments brought pleasure to my parents, but I thought he did this only to impress them and curry their favor.
Of course God was powerful, He had created the earth and everything that was seen, but what did He care about us or my brother’s songs? I was not sure He even knew we existed any longer. Though my parents had once had a relationship with Him, God seemed to have gone away, perhaps for good.
My parents insisted that we make sacrifices to Him, that we give Him the first fruits of our harvest and flocks and give thanks to Him for all we had. I couldn’t see any reason for this worship. We did all the work to provide for ourselves. As far as I was concerned, I worked harder than anyone else, so why did I have to give God anything?
Since God was so awesome and had so much power, why would He care what we gave Him or what we thought about Him? God was so far above us that we were probably nothing to Him. Since God no longer spoke to my parents as He once had, I believed He had forgotten them.
My parents insisted that it didn’t matter what God did, that we were His creation and we were obligated to make sacrifices and give our best to Him in thanks. As hard as I tried, I just couldn’t understand how they had come to the conclusion that we were obligated to God, but they were so insistent about sacrifices that I grudgingly did what I was told without arguing.
Rest days were usually a source of frustration to me. I had so much work to do with my crops, and I always felt as though I needed to be in my fields doing something. I had no desire to take a walk through the forest, and did not want to waste my time with singing or painting. I always felt the need to do productive activities.
Since my parents insisted I wasn’t allowed to actually work in the fields, I would use the rest days to plan what I could do later to help my crops. Though I would not admit it to anyone else, this forced time off from working in the fields helped me to think of several ways to produce more and better crops.
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While walking though a meadow I noticed that where the sheep left their waste the grass grew thicker and taller. I decided to take some of their waste and put it around my vegetables. I spread it around the base of some plants, and those vegetables seemed to jump from the earth. They grew taller and fuller than any I had ever seen. Though it was a nasty job, I now gathered waste from my brother’s flocks and carried it back to my fields to spread around my fruit and vegetable plants. This practice, which I had been following for over twenty years, had without a doubt greatly improved the yields of the plants.
It was on a rest day that I came up with the idea of how to bring water to my fields so I would not have to carry it there in buckets. I realized I could dig ditches through the fields which would channel the water to the areas where it was needed. I put wooden gates in the ditches to hold the water back, and opened them to allow the water to flow whenever needed. With these irrigation ditches I was able to increase the yield and the health of my crops, and save myself from the back-breaking work of carrying the water in buckets.
On another rest day, while sitting in my vegetable field I noticed that although all my plants grew under the same conditions, receiving the same amount of sun and water, certain plants were larger and healthier than others that grew right next to them. I had the idea to take the seeds of the healthier plants, and use only those seeds when planting for the next growing season. I thought perhaps this would cause all my plants to grow larger and be more productive. I tried this the next season and it worked. It had now been several years, and my plants were flourishing as never before.
I never told my family that all these ideas came to me on a rest day. Although I always insisted rest days were a waste of my time, a lot of good had actually come out of them.
After many days of thought while I walked through this wasteland, I now knew growing up and living in our land had been a life of relative ease. We worked hard to provide for ourselves, but we never wanted for anything. All our needs were met, and we even had excess. We rested when we needed, ate our fill and never wanted for more. I never went without anything, whether it was food or water, sleep, clothing, or any material object.
This was why my newfound abilities to travel without rest and almost no food or water were such a revelation. In all my life I had never needed to push myself this way. I found it wonderful, and I was intrigued that I was able to go so far past any physical limits that I had previously imagined my body to have.
In my parents’ house they had always insisted we needed to drink water frequently and eat food regularly to keep up our strength. After I discovered my new abilities, I wondered if my parents knew or even suspected they had the same abilities. After I thought about it a while, I realized that of course they knew, it just didn’t matter to them.
To my parents, the food and drink we shared brought us together around the table as a family. That was the most important thing in the world to them. The sleep of the night brought us into the house and bonded us together, and that was where their hearts rested.
I had come to the realization that my parents had no need or desire to test themselves. With our family and our home they knew what they had in their lives, and it was enough.
Perhaps this was because they already knew themselves. They knew what they once were and what they had become. Perhaps through their decisions and the actions they had taken in their lives, they had arrived at a place of stability with no need to push at any boundaries.
At one time I probably felt the same way as my parents about my life, but as I had gotten older my family and the land had not been enough to keep me satisfied.
Before I started my journey; before the act which caused my expulsion from my home, I had not known the cause of my dissatisfaction with my life. I had been looking for something, waiting for something, but I had not known what it was. And how could I have known what I was looking for, since I had never experienced anything besides what I had grown up with?
In these last days of walking as I had moved farther eastward, farther from all I had ever known, farther away from the safety and security of my parents’ home, I had finally discovered what I was looking for.
Freedom.
Freedom to make my own decisions. Freedom to make my own choices, whether they were right or wrong, good or bad, righteous or evil. I had to be free to become the person I wanted to and needed to become, not the person my parents, my brother, or even God wanted me to be.