So the LORD God banished [Adam] from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.  After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life (Genesis 3:23-24).

I’m among a dwindling number of people who remember childhood summers like that which forms the theme of “American Summer,” a painting by recently deceased local artist Armand Merizon. Merizon captured beautifully the joy of summer experienced by we “OAK Boys”: Ohlman, Andrews, and Kenfield—I and my two boyhood friends, who had the liberty to wander the local landscape all summer, shoeless and carefree.  When I saw this print at a garage sale, I was filled with nostalgia and had to buy it.

Nostalgia, a bittersweet emotion: It fills you with memories of wonderful past experiences—yet tells you can’t return.

My creation-care friend Jerry Lang recently sent me a devotional he wrote on a newly identified emotion that comes not when you leave a pleasant environment but when the environment leaves you.  Here are Jerry’s thoughts:

“Solastalgia” is a recently coined term created by combining the words “solace”, “desolation”, and “nostalgia”. It has been used by environmentalists referring to a feeling of homesickness while still at home—a sadness resulting from environmental changes that somehow severely alter or destroy the feelings associated with one’s home place. People along the Gulf Coast are certainly experiencing severe solastalgia associated with the BP oil spill devastation.  Other examples might be Appalachian people surrounded by mountaintop removal operations that have destroyed the surrounding landscape or commercial fishermen in the North Atlantic where fisheries they depended on have collapsed.

God created the earth as a home for humankind. There is no indication in the Genesis creation story that God ever intended for Adam and Eve to die and leave the paradise on earth he had created for them. But then sin entered the picture, and earthly paradise was lost (Gen. 3:23-24). Our relationship with earth’s creator was also broken. We began suffering from solastagia—a longing for home as the original earthly paradise was once and for restoration of our original relationship with the Creator. All creation began groaning under the bondage of sin (Rom. 8:22).

Although through Christ we are citizens of heaven (Phil. 3:20), God provides for us through the earth, which remains his and which he still loves despite our sinful damage to it (Ps. 24:1). While we long for heaven and know that Christ has prepared a place there for us (Jn. 14:2), Revelation shows us that, in the end, heaven will descend to earth and all (including the earth) will be made new (restored to a paradise).

Often on earth, we may feel like the Israelites who hung their harps on the willows of Babylon and wept (Ps. 137:2), but our hope remains in God (Ps. 42:11). While we know that our earthly home is not as God intended, we persevere tending our earthly garden (Gen. 2:15) in love until the day heaven and earth rejoin under the reign of Christ (Rev. 21:1-3).