“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting” said Wordsworth. We can’t remember what we did or who we were before we came into this life. Just about all of mankind has no recollection whatsoever of God, our heavenly Father. We can’t remember His face, the sound of His voice, or what it felt like to be with Him, in His presence. There were, however, two people who did not forget Him, for He walked and talked with them in the garden. After they were cast out, they still remembered His glorious face; they could still reminisce on the gentle sound of His voice, and what it felt like to be in His magnificent presence.

Spending time in the valley of Adam-ondi-Ahman, I have thought about our first earthly parents. For instance, as they labored in the earth to grow crops, that they might, by the sweat of their faces, eat their daily bread, I wonder if they ever looked at their dusty hands and remembered the saying of the Lord, that their bodies would one day return to the dust from whence they came. Did they ever sleep out under the stars and feel like outcasts, so far away from that sacred, lighted world where they truly wished to be? They knew true homesickness. And they knew that the family of the whole earth would follow in their mortal steps and have to endure the same separation from the loving God who made them. Yet, in all of this, there was hope. God had promised them that one day, through their posterity, a Child would be born, who would grow to manhood and repair everything that their transgression had caused. To them it was in the distant but certain future (for they had their assurance from God Himself). For us, it is in the distant, but certain past, for the Holy Spirit makes manifest that the Promised Child has come.