Blog 465 – 11.14.2016

The Oldest Profession

The old joke is that the oldest profession is prostitution, the buying and selling of sexual favors. But if you take the Genesis creation account literally the oldest profession is gardening. I do not take the creation story literally in fact I think it to be quite off in at least a couple of places. But I do think it highly likely that the first occupation was gardening followed closely by hunting/gathering but then probably prostitution running a close third. I mean really it makes sense that a man would have to have some produce, game, or cattle to bargain with, to seal the deal. This all started before the gold standard, cash, or credit cards.

I understand that marijuana was on the ballot in several more states and won in the last election. Prostitution is legal in only one state, Nevada, but practiced in all I am sure. I have often heard men protest, “I have never paid for sex.” Man has been paying for sex from the beginning. Only in relatively recent history have men not been required to pay a dowry to a father for his daughter. Is it any wonder men thought they owned their wives and treated them like possessions. You cannot legally own a person but you can rent them at least their time, labor, and whatever tasks they agree to do for money. In one sense most of us are prostitutes because we work for money. It comes as no great surprise that people are willing, men and women, to do a great many things for pay and have been all along.

But I stray from my topic. Thoughts of sex will do that to a guy, cause him to stray off course, women too. Admit it girls.

My topic is gardening. Adam’s first job was that of a gardener. Jesus was a carpenter, later a traveling preacher, but he was mistaken once for a gardener. It was Easter and one account has Mary Magdalene coming to minister to the dead body of her teacher, preacher, Lord (some speculate they were even closer.) Probably at least partly because her eyes were filled with tears coming across a risen walking talking Jesus she mistook him for the gardener and ask him where they had placed the body of the crucified Jesus. If Gomer Pyle had been re-enacting this scene I am sure he would have had to have thrown in a, “Surprise, Surprise.”

Before the arrest, trials, and crucifixion Jesus had prayed in a garden. Hang out in gardens often enough and someone is bound to mistake you for a gardener. I have had I suppose enough fun with the gardener thing. I would like to share the lyrics to one of the most beautiful songs about a garden that I have ever heard. I wish I could sing it for you and I will sometime if you will sit still for it. It goes like this:

“I come to the garden alone
While the dew is still on the roses
And the sound I hear falling on my ear
The Son of God discloses.

And He walks with me, and he talks with me, and He tells me I am His own
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known.”

Who among us does not dream of being loved like that? It is no dream. We are. Just visit a garden near you, open your heart and ears and listen and you will hear the sweetest voice in the wide world saying, “You are my garden. I planted you. I tended you. I coaxed every beautiful blossom. You are mine, nobody ever has or ever could love you as much as I do.”

Or words to that effect. The fact that we all desire to be loved like that is in itself a clear indication that we are for “eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither has in entered into the heart of man the things that God has prepared for them that love Him.” And how could we not if we really knew how tenderly and deeply we are loved?

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White