Note: From You Have a Calling (Brazos, 2025). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
I love the way John Milton in Paradise Lost imagines the work Adam and Eve did in Eden before the fall. Now, some of Milton’s theology (not to mention his anthropology) is questionable, but his theology of work displayed in this poem is beautiful. In writing an epic poem that portrays humanity’s expulsion from the garden, Milton imaginatively expands the spare details provided in just a few chapters of Genesis into an entire volume (twelve books of blank verse). Milton’s description of Adam and Eve in Eden reminds us that work, according to the biblical narrative, was not a result of the fall but part of paradise itself.
We Work amid Abundance and Scarcity
But work done in a context of abundance (which is how Milton portrays the pre-fallen garden) differs from the labor required within a place of scarcity. Thus, in one passage, Adam describes the work he and Eve are about to do as “our delightful task / To prune these growing plants, and tend these flowers.” Later, Eve describes their efforts in even more detail:
Adam, well may we labour still to dress
This garden, still to tend plant, herb and flower,
Our pleasant task enjoined; but, till more hands
Aid us, the work under our labour grows,
Luxurious by restraint; what we by day
Lop overgrown, or prune, or prop, or bind,
One night or two with wanton growth derides
Tending to wild . . .
No Weedn’ in Eden
In such verdant environs as Eden, the first humans work not to procure but to prune, not to eke out but to contain – to dress, tend, lop, prune, prop and bind the “wanton growth” of flowers, fruit and foliage. Once humanity falls into sin, the curse laid upon them is not labor itself but labor accompanied by pain, whether the pangs of birth or those of thorns and thistles.
When I first moved to the near-tropical paradise of Virginia some years ago, I gained an entirely new perspective about the curse wrought by weeds. In Virginia, we have all the usual varieties of smaller vegetative pests – dandelions, buttercups and crabgrass – harmless, even cute. (I do tend to let buttercups run wild!) But the weeds here include hardy, sometimes gargantuan vines and stalks that will grow as tall as trees and as thick as your wrist in one season if left unchecked. (Have you ever heard of pokeweed? If not, you are blessed indeed.) My gardening work consists primarily of pulling out (or sawing down!) the plants I don’t want to grow and less tending of the plants I do want to grow.
Before embarking on my gardening-as-weeding adventures, I certainly understood the effects of sin on the world and our lives. But learning how quickly and vigorously strong weeds choke out tender beauties offered an object lesson like I never had before. The natural world visibly and tangibly displays the supernatural realities that surround us. This phenomenon includes the way work in the fallen world is encumbered with toil and strife.
The thorns, thistles and labor pains that accompany our work today can take any number of forms. And while too much of a good thing can present its own problems, I think most would agree that scarcity – scarcity of work, opportunities, invitations, clients, money, time – is a weed that often chokes the joy and peace out of life. Sometimes that scarcity is real, very real. But other times it is our fear of scarcity – fear that money, opportunities, relationships or capacity will be lacking – that drives our decisions, when we should be making choices based on our true calling rather than the fear of missing out.
God calls us to a life of abundance, not scarcity. God’s economy is based on plenitude. If we believe that, accept it, see it and own it, how different our decisions (and emotional states) might be.
Yet there are blessings even amid scarcity. They are just harder to recognize. Robert Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays” perfectly captures this. The speaker in the poem, a grown man, looks back on the work – and love – offered during his childhood by his father, a laborer during the week, who rose early on Sundays (“too” because he had to rise early the other days of the week as well) to warm the house and polish his son’s boots.
This calling was an “austere,” lonesome and difficult office for the father, whose sacrifice the son didn’t recognize until long after:
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
Much has been said in recent years about the “crisis of manhood,” particularly for men who are coming of age within a rapidly changing world in which work, roles and family relationships are shifting underfoot like quicksand. In their search for significance, some young men (and women too) have turned increasingly to internet stars, celebrity gurus, famous new converts to Christianity and the like as role models and inspiration. Most of the “work” by such people will not last, however. Hayden’s poem offers a contrasting picture of the kind of work – often austere, lonely and thankless – that will bear fruit for generations to come.
Do They Wear “New Shoes” in “Eden”?
There will always be work to do. God works. He made us as creatures designed to join him in his work here on earth. As Ben Witherington notes in Work: A Kingdom Perspective on Labor, there will also be work to do in the new heaven and the new earth, just as there was in that first paradise. The prophet Isaiah says some of that future work will entail beating swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks (Isaiah 2:4), as well as building houses and planting vineyards (Isaiah 65:21).
Witherington opens his book by quoting the beginning of a poem by Emily Dickinson in which she contemplates the work and the workers that might be part of the afterlife. Here is the poem in its entirety:
What is – “Paradise” –
Who live there –
Are they “Farmers” –
Do they “hoe” –
Do they know that this is “Amherst” –
And that I – am coming – too –
Do they wear “new shoes” – in “Eden” –
Is it always pleasant – there –
Won’t they scold us – when we’re homesick –
Or tell God – how cross we are –
You are sure there’s such a person
As “a Father” – in the sky –
So if I get lost – there – ever –
Or do what the Nurse calls “die” –
I shan’t walk the “Jasper” – barefoot –
Ransomed folks – won’t laugh at me –
Maybe – “Eden” a’n’t so lonesome
As New England used to be!
Dickinson wonders if the inhabitants of heaven will be workers doing the kind of work they did on earth: “farmers” who “hoe.” Her use of quotation marks with various words throughout the poem suggests the emblematic nature of these images. If this world (“New England”) is a picture of the next world, then the death that will bring her to the new Eden will be a kind of work to “do.” Someone in heaven will be making shoes. Because of their work, she won’t have to walk barefoot on the jeweled streets of the new Jerusalem: jasper is one of the precious stones mentioned in the new heavenly city described in Revelation 21. A city, of course, is a place made by human work – although even nature and gardens require work to make the country hospitable and beautiful to human creatures, as Adam and Eve well knew.
Content taken from You Have a Calling by Karen Swallow Prior, ©2025. Used by permission of Brazos Press.
Karen Swallow Prior, Karlson Scholar, Bethel Seminary
