ALIVE: Chapter Two - The Next Day

Chapter Two – The Next Day

Cain ran away from his dead brother to escape the visual horror of the blood-stained earth that he caused, and to escape witnessing the deep grief of his parents when they find him. How could he have known this would happen? No one in the family knew what the curse of death meant. Cain was in shock and felt ashamed. All he could do was run, which kept him from thinking.

Childless again, Adam and Eve gradually accepted their loss and knew instinctively that it did no good to look for blame. Eve had plenty of time to think about the difference between life and death. She still couldn't imagine how she could die someday since no human had ever died, except Abel and that was caused. How could anyone die naturally? It didn’t make sense.

The chirping birds reminded her of the days before she knew about death at all. Did death exist before she was made; did the snake know about death? Did it want her to die? Then, she thought about Abel and that God said that Abel went to a place called Hades. Where was that? What was it? Those endless thoughts demanded answers, so she went to look for Adam.

"Adam, ADAM where are you!" she hollered. Eve went over to his favorite cave and called his name again; no answer. Then she went to Cain's garden where she found him tying up tomato plants on the clever conical frames he had constructed with branches and vines.

"Here I am, what is it?"

"Adam, can we talk?"

"Okay," he said, glad for the break. She went closer to him and together they walked hand in hand up the hill to their favorite grassy spot. When they arrived, Adam was first to break the silence, "What's on your mind?"

"Adam, before I was created, did God tell you anything about being alive without a body? How is that possible? Being alive to me means being able to see and hear and feel, it means to be able to run through the fields and hug and make cartwheels. Remember when God said that Abel went to Hades? Where is that? We buried his lifeless body in the earth. Is Hades in the earth? Or is he somewhere else without a body, like God who we can hear but don’t see?"

"No, Eve. God didn't tell me anything about all that. Remember, before you came, we never heard of death. But think about it, God is alive, and we speak to Him and He speaks to us, but He has no body, and He said we were made in His image. So being alive may have nothing to do with being in a body, because we know that God is alive, and we don’t see Him."

Eve's grief turned to confusion and then despair. She began to weep again.

"Come on Eve, snap out of it. There is nothing we can do but live and breathe, grow food and eat it, and tend Abel's flock and Cain’s garden. We should be much too busy to think. Let's go back and work on those tomato plants some more. Don't you like the name I gave them? TOE-MAY-TOE! I thought it sounded funny." said Adam trying to console her with a little levity, but he failed, and they kept thinking out loud together.

***

Meanwhile, Cain was well along on his journey hiking up and around mountainsides and traversing stream beds where he washed off his brother's blood and watched the clear water turn mauve. While hiking, Cain thought about his brother and he missed him. Abel should have been on this journey with him. They had had so many adventures together, climbing trees and trying to ride on the animals. But soon his sense of guilt returned and with it the familiar fear and grief. He had to remind himself that God marked him so no one could kill him. Then he wondered how God could have been so kind to him after he murdered his own brother. It was as if his jealousy lost its force overtime and turned into remorse.     

What did God say? What was that?! Cain struggled to remember. “If you offered Me your sacrifices with love from the labor of your hands, but then divided your love for Me with your self-love, then didn’t you pull away from Me? That is sin. Remember how the evil serpent persuaded your mother to think of herself more than to trust Me? This is the same; he is dividing you now. You must not allow that to happen. You should rule over him. Don’t allow yourself to feel that way. You should master him.  Be still, be silent, relax.”

Cain tried harder to understand this advice. It was the only defense he had against collapse. Don’t focus on myself. My sadness, my feeling rejected turned to anger, and the anger exploded and caused me to kill by own brother? It didn’t have to happen. The Lord was right; I should not have been sad and become so angry. All I thought about was myself. I should have been happy for my brother and ask why God loved his lamb more than my grapes. I am so sorry. Here I am alone. 

Then, Cain’s thoughts turned again to Abel and his sheep; how he corralled them and drove them hither and yon, from the grassy fields to the streams. Abel was the master of his sheep. "What do I know about being the master of anything, especially the slimy serpent, or my emotions?" He thought. "My plants don't have a mind of their own. They never go off to hide. I have never had to master anything or anyone. Well, maybe I tried to master Abel, when I killed him. I didn’t mean to kill him. I was just angry. Oh Abel!!! Please come back and help me!"

"Why did I automatically focus on myself? I gave in to an impulse; I didn’t try to stop myself. Why didn’t my love for my brother stop me? No, I was pushed; no, I pushed myself. It was the easier thing to do. To stop myself would have been the right thing but I was driven, no I drove myself to do something that I regret and will always regret. Oh Abel, please forgive me? Where are you?  Can you tell me?" Cain's mind spun him to and fro. He felt like he was grabbing at falling leaves.

Cain fell to the ground in mental exhaustion. Fortunately for him, he was in a grassy field. He closed his eyes and breathed in the fresh smell of grass. He tried to sleep away his confusion. Sleep didn’t come so fast. So, he tried to free himself from his thoughts by simply feeling the warmth of the late afternoon sun on his bare skin. He listened to all the different sounds of birds and little animals around him. He tried to identify them, then he tried to count them. Sleep finally settled his mind into the dark emptiness that he desired, until the dream...

"Cain, I'll race you to that olive tree, okay? Ready, set, ...”

"Wait a minute! I am not ready."

Abel started running anyhow and a band of little sheep ran by his side.

Seeing his brother running with the sheep, Cain took off to catch up. The sheep ran faster than Abel so Cain passed Abel too. Slowing down to breathe convulsively he looked back; Abel was engulfed in a sea of sheep and strange winged beings with human faces hovering in the air.

"BOO! Did I scare you?" said Abel suddenly right in his face, then to his sheep he said, "Come here sheep, now stand in a straight line. Show this brother of mine what it means to obey."

A handful of sheep of different sizes all lined up head to tail in a serpentine formation, like a long woolen river.

"Heads left!" commanded Abel.

All sheep heads faced Cain. A hundred sets of eyes pierced his guilt-ridden soul.

Cain turned his head away. He couldn't bear to see those sheep eyes glaring at him.

He started to run, but he found himself running toward Abel.

"Stop!" shouted Abel. "I command you to stop running." Cain wondered how he could hear Abel so clearly. It was as if his brother was speaking to him in his head.

Just then, Cain awoke in a dewy mist. Drenched and groggy he stood up to shake off the water. He was glad and sorry that he only saw Abel in a dream. While still not fully awake, Cain tried as hard as could to return to the dream where he could be with his brother again and ask him how to master himself. Cain hadn't forgotten how much he wanted to know how to master himself.

Then he remembered how his mother and father would call out to God and God would speak to them. Perhaps God would return and talk to him again.

"God!" Cain shouted as loudly as he could. Then he waited for a while. Nothing.

"God!!!! I need to talk to you!!! Please come here!" he yelled louder, surprising himself.

After a while of waiting through the silence for God to answer, Cain gave up and continued his lonely journey, heading toward the sunset to Nod.

Half a furlong later Cain felt a foreign presence within him. To test it, he said out loud, "How will I eat if I cannot tend my precious fruit and vegetables?"

Surprisingly, he heard a reply, "You will forage for your food. God has planted food for you along this road to Nod, a time and a half before you were born."

Then Cain asked the angelic voice, "Why did God prefer Abel's lamb to my offering? We both gave Him of the fruit of our labor?"

The angel replied, "Because the lamb and calf were alive and cute. If you were God, you too would look at those sweet animals before looking at a basket of grapes. Also, because someday humans will transfer their sins, their selfishness, anger, and all sorts of evils to lambs and then kill the lambs. And again, someday after that God will provide a Lamb of God that that will take away all the sins of those who want that. You couldn't have known that, and you couldn’t understand now, even if I told you.  Where you went wrong, your concern was only for yourself, not for the Lord's joy, or for your brother's."

"Was that what God meant by sin?"

"Yes. The Lord our God is LOVE personified. Love cares for others. This is why God can be so tolerant. Why He kindly marked you to protect you from danger, and why He wasn’t angry with you for focusing on yourself.”

Then the angel looked sternly and seriously at Cain and added, “He didn’t kill you.”

To soften the truth, the angel said “Imagine yourself in a circle around God and His angels; now imagine that you jettisoned yourself out of the circle. When you make yourself the center of your world, you are disturbing all of creation. Like the moon shooting out of orbit, like chaos."

"I have no idea what you are saying. What is chaos?"

"Of course you don't know." replied the angel. "Sorry, don't bother to try.

The point is that if you don't master sin, it will master you. Sin will drive you to do many bad things like killing your brother. If you always submit you will wander farther from God, because you will become less like Him as He made you to be. You must first learn how to see sin as an unwelcome guest within you, much in the way that I am a visitor within you right now. You must create an inner shield deep within your mind and heart to separate yourself from the power of self, that is what it means to master it. If you have no self-control, then that serpent and worse will control you. Master yourself! Sometimes it is a serpent inside you, and sometimes it’s a part of you, and all your fault, like it was your mother’s, when she ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

The angel went on, "Did you notice how kind God was to you, even to the point of giving you the mark of protection, just as He gave your parents clothing when they sinned, when they separated themselves from His love?

Try to be like Him as you go into the world and encounter children of men who will act in opposition to you. Treat them as God treated you and your parents in your own rebellion. I have said enough. Think about these things that you may live well. Show God that you can try to master yourself as He said. That’s more important than if you never made a mistake, as bad as it was. ."

The angel left Cain as suddenly as it had arrived. He tried to continue the conversation in his mind, but nothing came. It was more obvious than ever that he wasn't talking to himself, but to an angel, who like God he couldn’t see, but he could hear in his mind the voice that was counseling him.

By then Cain's stomach growled loudly. No sooner had the thought come into his mind than He looked at his feet to find himself amid a field of strawberries. He crouched down and popped strawberries after strawberry into his mouth with such rapidity that the little chipmunks ambling around stared at him in amazement.