Learning from Toy Story

Church yesterday was really good. My friend spoke about how we tend to find our identities and value in various things—our occupation and career, a significant other, our strengths, etc. But what happens when we're laid off? Or a loved one dies? Or we lose abilities that we once had? I won't just regurgitate everything he said, but the parallel he used to finish his talk was extremely powerful.

He mentioned the scene in Toy Story (the first movie), when Buzz has that catastrophic moment when everything crumbled. Buzz thought he had been a powerful space ranger, saving the galaxy from a great evil. But it turns out he is just a toy. Despondent, numb, Buzz lost all desire to do anything. But Woody tells Buzz the profound truth, that he wasn't just a toy. He was Andy's toy. He was loved and wanted. He belonged to someone and was considered special. All he had to do was look at the name written on his foot, in permanent marker. He was Andy's.

That's a ridiculously powerful realization. I think almost all of us can understand and appreciate the idea and feeling of being loved. We give and receive that from each other in our best moments. We know that that's like, even if we've had a lot of experiences of the opposite. We just don't normally let it sink in... And life can whisper lies to us about our worth. But the reality is that we aren't "just a human". We're not nobody's. We're somebody's. We belong to God, in the best sense of the word. He loves us and has written His name on our foot, in permanent marker. For the moments we forget that, maybe we need to keep a copy of Toy Story in the DVD player. We need to be reminded, constantly, of whose we are. Everything in our culture seems to be pushing us to be independent and self-reliant and capable of doing life without needing to rely on anything or anyone, that our worth is in what we can do, or how well we can marry, or what accolades we can accomplish.

Those things can be stripped away. The Name that's been written on our feet can't be. Let's all remember who we belong to and receive that love from God. That's at the heart of what the gospel and Christianity is all about, I think. Loving God from our hearts, in light of His great love for us.

Tree of Life

The first three chapters of the first book of the Bible are hard to understand, difficult to interpret. There's mythological imagery throughout, yet later books of the Bible refer to the stories and images while drawing theologically important analogies and implications through them. I feel ill-equipped with my modern/post-modern way of thinking to understand or pull value from myths. I'm not suggesting that Genesis is just another myth of how the world began, simply acknowledging that it has a lot of same literary style and imagery that other similar how-the-world-began myths employ.

So that leads me to my current question. What was the Tree of Life that Moses mentioned in Genesis? (It's also mentioned in Revelation 2:7)

True, it's not an incredibly practical question. Maybe no deep theological issue hangs in the balance here, but it got me thinking and... well, you know what happens when I get thinking.

The Bible says there were two trees in the center of the Garden of Eden. A Tree of Life and a Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam and Eve were allowed to eat from any tree, but God told them not to eat from the latter tree. They disobeyed and brought death/decay/curse on the rest of humanity that followed them. Upon "learning" about what they had done, God has a conversation with Himself via the Trinity and says in the third chapter of the book, in the 22 verse, "Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—" and proceeded to banish Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden and stationed an angelic being with a flaming sword to keep them from returning.

Here are my questions as I attempt to make sense of this story.

Would Adam and Eve have lived forever before they ate from the Knowledge tree? If yes, was that because that's what humanity was designed for or was it because they were eating from the Tree of Life? If not, is that why the Tree of Life was put there, to be a source of ever-lasting life, immortality for them?

What if, after they had eaten from the Knowledge Tree, they had been allowed to eat from the Tree of Life? Or what if they had eaten from it before God kicked them out? They would have lived forever, according to God, but... in what kind of state? It seems that eating from that Tree of Life might have had the same effect as the salvation that comes to humanity through Jesus Christ?

I'm not sure there's much answer to this question. I don't get what the Tree of Life was doing prior to the Fall. I assume they hadn't eaten from it before eating from the other Tree (of Knowledge)... Otherwise, does that mean the Knowledge Tree's effect canceled the effect of eating the Tree of Life first?

Is this a literal story? Is this some kind of myth that God used to explain things to Moses and the early humans? I'm okay with saying that we won't always understand things, but I think it's valuable for us as Christians to question these things with the hope of finding answers.