"Adam and I" explained

A "poem" which needs explaining may very well not truly be one. The verses in the previous post are in the rough stage and may never develop farther. When I thought about them more, I realized I hadn't really captured my thoughts clearly, and that the verses could, in fact, seem presumptuous.

So here, in prose, is another attempt to document this part of my journey.

As introverts are apt to do, I recently experienced an inner storm whose onset had little to do with the present weather of the world outside myself. I am caught in the grip of crucial questions about my own identity and about the nature of human relationships.

The beginning is a good place to start looking for answers to these questions, so I've been reading in Genesis--hence "Adam and I." I see there that the strife which ensnares the world today began a long time ago with the first family. I feel the dysfunction and sin which shadows my own interactions with others, and I see the same darkness at work all around me. The children I look after not uncommonly ask for prayer for family members who have been shot. A co-worker's brother was recently murdered. Racial tension, often submerged below the level of easy identification, threatens fellowship in churches--even assemblies dedicated to experiencing the reconciliation offered through Christ. It makes a terrible kind of sense to me that the ripping apart of fellowship, the breaking and tearing in the whole world, first exerted itself in the intimacy of family life. The forces within my own heart and the hearts of those I love which threaten reconciliation and closeness should be no surprise. They reach, nearly, to the beginning of human history. They begin in the most fundamental, emotionally close, element of society.

And so, I imagine that if I could go back in time and talk to Adam, I would recognize that terrible breaking and pulling apart happening then just as it is now. To me, that aspect of his world would seem "much the same." But this is not the whole story. I would look at Adam and see the unbroken thread of severed relationship, but what would he see when he looked at me? Wouldn't the man who once walked with God in the cool of the evening recognize the wonder I often overlook--the presence of God's Spirit within me?

Things haven't gone on just the same as always. In a nearly unbelievable event, God split history in two. Through the broken body of my Lord, God binds my heart to His own, and mine to my brother's. I don't understand it, I often don't feel like it's true, but it is. Unremarkable, struggling humans like myself may experience God's healing life within them, not coming and going as with the prophets of old, but steady, always abiding. This, along with the brokenness, is part of my identity.

Not that I really understand this . . . yet.