“And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” It seems pretty clear after God outlines the life ahead of Adam and Eve after they leave the Garden of Eden that they are being punished for their transgression. After all, words like “curse” and “sorrow” could hardly mean anything else but punishment. But God also says that the earth will be cursed “for thy sake”. In a letter written in 1958, JRR Tolkien writes, “A divine ‘punishment’ is also a divine ‘gift,’ if accepted, since its object is ultimate blessing, and the supreme inventiveness of the Creator will make “punishments” (that is, changes of design) produce a good not otherwise to be attained.” God did curse the ground as a punishment, but we misunderstand His purposes if we believe that such a punishment is evidence that He hates us. His punishments are a gift. He has given us a broken world because He knows that we like to fix things, that we need to fix things. “God left the world unfinished for man to work his skill upon. He left the electricity in the cloud, the oil in the earth. He left the rivers unbridged and the forests unfelled and the cities unbuilt. God gives to man the challenge of raw materials, not the ease of finished things. He leaves the pictures unpainted and the music unsung and the problems unsolved, that man might know the joys and glories of creation.” (Thomas S Monson March 1988). We may imagine that this world would be so much better if only there weren’t so many problems. We may imagine this, but we would be wrong. I remember reading some science fiction story one time that imagined this perfect utopia where no one had to work or do anything they didn’t want to because everything was automated. But the character in the story wanted to work, so he was told to go around the city and loosen certain bolts. One day he ran into another fellow laborer, whose job it was to tighten all of the bolts that he himself had been loosening. The Garden of Eden was a nice place to live for a little while, but we are Makers and Fixers. We wouldn’t be happy in a world that had no problems to fix. I hope that we can all come to realize that anything we receive from the Lord that we believe to be a punishment or a curse is actually just a gift and a blessing that we don’t understand yet.
