Gen 3:16 To the woman He said, "I will greatly multiply Your pain in childbirth, In pain you will bring forth children; Yet your desire will be for your husband, And he will rule over you."
Gen 3:17 Then to Adam He said, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, 'You shall not eat from it'; Cursed is the ground because of you; In toil you will eat of it All the days of your life.
Gen 3:18 "Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; And you will eat the plants of the field;
Gen 3:19 By the sweat of your face You will eat bread, Till you return to the ground, Because from it you were taken; For you are dust, And to dust you shall return."
Whenever I visit my dad at his lifestyle section, we take a walk through his back yard. It's a fantastic place in the hills with New Zealand native bush at the bottom. As we walk through the yard, my dad bends down and picks out a thistle in the grass. He shows me how he always has to go around pulling them out. Often he has to spend hundreds of dollars on spray to kill them, and then they just eventually grow back.
Next door, the neighbor owns a bigger section. He is cursed with gorse - a nasty sprawny nettle with razor sharp spikes over it's entirety which bears yellow flowers. What a curse this is. Every farmer knows it. They spend so much time, energy, and money trying to get rid of the stuff. No animal eats it (except a really really hungry goat), and no spray kills it completely. When you hack it down with a tractor, it leaves nasty stumps. Then you go around and paint poison on every stump (there are often hundreds). Next season you realize that gorse seeds spread to the rest of your land - seeds that can't be burned or poisoned. New gorse starts sprouting up everywhere, and it's back to the expensive spray. It's almost impossible to get rid of - it takes constant work season after season, just to get a clear field.
When we work in jobs, there's just stuff we hate doing. No matter what job you work, there is always stuff you just don't wanna do. Isn't it always hard to make ends-meet when you're a student? What do you do when there's a recession and your company goes bankrupt or you get made redundant?
Don't mothers experience great pain in childbirth, have c-sections, and sometimes die? What is a doctor to say when a mother loses her baby? What comfort can anyone offer her? And why amidst this trouble do people still choose to have 42 million abortions each year?
Why is it simply so hard to save money? Why are men often seen as domineering, or why do they shy away instead like little boys?
Why is the most popular villain in fairy tales portrayed as a fierce woman?
If only we had obeyed God. Since the fall of man, this has never been an easy life. And it never will. But praise the Lord he offers us hope all the way through until the end, when he will re-create life with perfect jobs for us and no suffering, toil, tears, or pain. Christ will return for us, and he will set us free from this world and our present selves. This is the hope we have, and this is the hope we stand for.
