Eden’s Garden is about my first-born. My wife and I had been living in the Los Angeles area for several years and had seen floods, fires, the L.A. riots, crime, drive by shootings, and more fires. Eden was born in this environment (pollution in the sky—“on the evening of a crimson moon”—also foreshadowing another moon that would be turned to blood—just before the Savior’s return) and we wanted to protect her from all of the evil. Soon after, came the Northridge earthquake, who’s epicenter (I had been told) was about 15 miles from our home…“We would feel the earth bow down and mourn, and cry for Eden” (not just sad that Eden and other children had to live “in a land of [spiritual] briers and thorns” but also in another way, crying for—longing for—that old land of Eden where God the Father and Jesus the Son had walked with Adam and Eve in the garden). But, as badly as we wanted to protect our little Eden, we realized that we could only do what we could do.

Soon we felt impressed to move to Salt Lake City, where we bought our first home. We have an apple tree in our back yard. It gives us delicious apples. But all we do is water it. We prune it a little every year, but to make the apples grow, we just water it. Meanwhile, “the Master of the harvest turns our watering into wine”, the sweet, delicious fruit. And so it is with our parenting. We can plant the seeds of faith and testimony, tend to the growing plant with care, keeping it from the scorching sun, weeding around it so it isn’t robbed of it’s needed nutrients, and watch as it grows and grows…“never trifling with the giving of our time”—that’s the most important thing we can give our children—time! But, after all we can do, it’s really the Savior, that blesses our little ones with testimony and faith and all the good things that will lead them back into His Kingdom. We must do our work, and we must let the Savior do His. “Sweetest joy of our lives!”

There’s a line in the song that says, “And though we know she won’t belong to us…” Now, this might bother some, but the truth is, she belongs to God. We provided her with a physical body but the real her—the spirit that animates that body—is God’s daughter, made in His image. He fathered her. Yes, we will love her as a daughter and friend all of our lives, with the best love that’s in us, willing to do anything for her, even die for her; but we must not forget who she really is and from whence she has really come.