"We are golden,

"We are caught in the devil's bargain,

"And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden."

So goes the closing chorus to Joni Mitchell's song "Woodstock" as recorded by Crosby, Still, Nash and Young on their 1970 "Deja Vu" project.

A real blast from the past.

Some days it seems like 1970 was forever and day ago, yet, at other times the memories are so fresh they could be yesterday's.

That closing line, "back to the garden" rings as true today as it did when I first encountered this music in my youth.

This world we call home is not the world we were made for. This is not the world the Lord God made and said "was very good."

Once upon a time, for a very brief period of time indeed, it was both the world we were made for and the good world the Lord God had made.

In an instant it all changed, and has never ceased changing since that moment in time when it was utterly ruined.

In the world the Lord God made, the world we were meant to inhabit, there was no darkness, no sin, no death, no good-byes, no suffering -- none of the things so prevalent today.

In the garden, babies were to be brought forth with great joy and without suffering, long, full, satisfying lives ahead of them. Work was to be a pleasure, not the often painful, sweaty struggle against thorns and briars we endure today. The bodies God created for the garden were designed to last for centuries, made to rise in the morning wholly refreshed, designed to enjoy the Lord's bounty in the garden and to be satisfied with all that the Lord God had made and called good.

What do we have instead?

Tragedies are common place. It seems truth and justice are dead. Babies die a-borning. Mothers die in childbirth. Cancer strikes with increasing frequency in ever new and disturbing permutations and hangs as a threat over the very young and the very old and everyone in between. Sons, young fathers, entire families are taken on the dangerous roadways we travel. It seems that war claims only the innocent -- the guilty having shielded themselves too well. Life reminds us daily of our frailty and we are all too aware and so very weary of the many good-byes we've said and the good-byes yet to be spoken. These truths all came rushing back last week when it was feared that cancer threatened a nine-year-old boy. All I could do was cry, "Mercy, Lord. Have mercy. This is not the world you intended for us, have mercy."

Back to the garden. What a wonderful thought. If only we could return to the place where the Lord God once walked in the shade, communing with his crowning creation, man.

However, Joni wrote "We've got to get ourselves back to the garden," in vain.

We cannot get ourselves back, though we yearn for it with all of our hearts, though we strive for it every day, though we dream of that idyllic place and our secret hearts frequently weep at all that was lost on that long ago day.

Hope is found only when we discover that the entire history of man since that bleak day is the story of God reaching out to his crowning creation, offering reconciliation and restoration. Hope is found in the promise Jesus made when he told his disciples, "I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am." (John 14:2, 3)

Dread, however, is found in the realization that another place also has been prepared. A place we were never intended to inhabit, never even needed to know about until we ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This place has been prepared in advance for the devil and his angels (Matthew 25:41). Sadly, tragedy above all other tragedies, there will be those who, though created in the image of God, will nevertheless inherit the punishment originally intended only for the devil and his angels.

Throughout the history of man, God has held out life and death and given each of us permission to choose, promising only to honor our decision, though it breaks his heart and results in eternal ruination when we lose our way home to him.

Our hearts long for that garden, man's first home. And there is but one road home.

"I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes unto the Father except through me." John 14:6

Things you won't see in heaven: detour signs