A Story of Man, For My Son.
This story contains no lies.
Once, a very long time ago, there was an animal who became aware. He lifted his head from his normal animal life and noticed that he was there. He stopped simply doing the things he was created to do, and he started to imagine. He started to think of things he could do. Some of these were memories of things he had done, some were entirely new.
Nobody knows exactly how it happened. People have their grand theories today. Some of them tell a wonderful story of a loving Father’s creation and His special attention to this child, who we will call Adam. Some stories say it was all an accident in a cold and infinite universe which should never have been. Those people also believe that it’s all going to end, and it will be as though the whole universe never was. Nothing left, not even us. Some funny people think Adam evolved from a fish. Some of these stories have become grand religions whose members get very angry if you question their faith. But nobody knows for sure. We must use our wits to decide what is true. Here are some things, however, that we know are true.
That first man found a first woman and he loved her. She was the glove for his hand in the wilderness. He could build and hunt and protect her from the wild, and she could inspire him and give him great joy and pleasure. And for this exchange they loved each other very much and they decided to live together and cooperate. And the man felt part of his nature calling to him. Something that all animals know they must do. His body told him he needed children. It was not something he thought about, or planned. His body let him know that his job was to make babies and to protect them. So he planted a seed in the woman, and she took his seed into her body and her body too was ready to make babies, because she had a tiny little egg waiting inside her. It was waiting for a seed to visit.
But it wasn’t just one seed the man planted in her, for his love for her was great, and he planted every seed he had in his body to make sure the job was done. In the batch of seeds, he planted over two hundred million. But these seeds weren’t like seeds of a flower carried on the breeze, each of these two hundred million seeds had a WILL to be the winner. They found themselves in a stream inside the woman, and they could sense the egg, and they knew that all they had to do was reach and enter the egg! The egg was much bigger than these tiny swimming seeds, and many millions of them attached themselves and tried to find their way in.
But they were too weak.
The egg was too hard to enter! They swam and swam and pushed with all their might. But none of them could make it in. Some gave up and floated away, waiting to run out of life and disappear into oblivion, all the stories that one of them carried vanishing forever. But ONE of those seeds was strong. He was the champion of them all, and he pushed through the egg, and when he entered, the egg seized him, and the exchange began!
In this silent, warm place, the egg learned everything she could from the seed. He told her all the stories of his father, every adventure he had had, every challenge he had overcome, and the stories of all that Adam’s body knew. Perhaps they were from his ancestors, perhaps they were memories of being built by God. Nobody knows for sure, because it was so long ago, but we do know that the egg also shared her stories, as many as she could remember to tell about her mother, Eve, and all she had learned.
These two stories swirled together and danced, and, fusing themselves into one another, became ONE story, but not the whole of either original story. Some things were lost, but to each side of the story, many new things were gained, for Adam and Eve had not had the same life in every way.
And a baby was formed, already destined for greatness because he was the one-in-two-hundred-million champion who could penetrate the precious sanctuary of the one-in-only-four-hundred eggs that this woman will ever produce. This seed got the treasure, and by entering it and fusing with her story, this seed and egg became a child who said with his first action in life: “I WILL WIN, AND I WILL CONQUER!”
And so Cain was born. And Cain was loved, but when his younger brother came in the same way as he, Cain suddenly felt very jealous of his parent’s affection. HE was the champion. He was the one-in-two-hundred-million! Now another had made it through the threshold and awakened as a child in the world. ANOTHER CHAMPION!? This was preposterous. How could THIS little thing be a champion?, thought Cain. The baby was puny. Cain was already big and strong and knew how to hunt with his father. He could already talk and run. This little thing that his mother just gave birth to was weak, unable to say words, always screaming, and worst of all, little Abel seemed to get ALL the attention of his parents.
Adam saw the jealousy in his eldest son, but he didn’t understand it. He didn’t have a brother. He didn’t even remember his own father, or if he had one. He had vague memories of a giant who loved him, but then he remembered doing something he could never undo, betraying the trust of his father whom he couldn’t picture. The betrayal changed him, and made him afraid, and ashamed. And he left his home.
Adam didn’t know how to guide his son Cain, and the resentment in Cain’s heart towards his younger brother grew and grew, and it made him awaken in the night sweating, angry. It made him agitated easily by his brother. He was so afraid of losing the affections of his parents that he began to hate his younger brother. He couldn’t see that this was another champion like him, and one he could teach to love him, one he could join forces with and be even mightier still – two against nature! All he saw was threat, for he had brought his father’s story along in himself, in the very cells of his body. He couldn’t remember it in his mind, but his genes carried the memory of his father’s shame; his father’s fear. And this fear grew until one day, Cain turned on his brother in anger, and killed him. He had to leave his father now, in shame, just as his father had before him. And so began the pattern of our fathers, right back at the start.
Cain found other people, though they were not like him or his parents, or his beloved brother, now dead, whose screams haunted Cain everywhere he went, in his dreams. These other people were simpler, and Cain had to teach them to be conscious like him. He trained them like he would the animals in the garden in which his parents had raised him.
The simple people worshipped Cain, he was something special. Tall and strong, conscious, and teaching them things they could never have thought of on their own. He was like a God to them, and when he had sons, they too were powerful and wise like him. Though not quite as much. For the story of the simple people was woven into them also, and some of the father’s story was lost to the mother’s, and some of the mother’s was lost to the father’s. The sons of Cain became great men nevertheless, and as the simple people continued their families growing, the sons of Cain were seen as great men as they guided the building of great civilisations. Over generations they built and built and built, and warred, and stole, and became evil doers in almost every way.
But calamity befell them when their people had become so powerful that they also became stupid. Just a small handful of people survived a great flood, and the man we call Noah was among them.
The great men of renown were all drowned at the bottom of the ocean. The evil civilisation was completely wiped out and consumed by water. The story of this great flood was so important, that every ancient culture tells of it, on every continent of the world today.
In Noah and his sons, the memories of the sons of Adam continued to live.
Now Noah’s sons already had wives, but then they had children, and there was no one else about, so their children had to marry and love one another. These cousins did marry, and their stories combined, and then their children did the same, but over time the stories had fewer and fewer new stories to bring into life. They were all related, all the stories had been told, and the story of Cain was gradually drowned out by the stories of the many other fathers in the lines of Noah’s son’s wives. But not completely. That first story, the story of shame and of fear, never went away completely. Nor did any of the new stories of evil and suffering that were brought in by the descendants of Cain. Much evil existed in the story of man now, no matter where you looked.
Because the strength of the great first conscious man had faded, so the days in the lives of these new humans reduced. The men of old lived many centuries, the new men lived many fewer decades. Each generation seemed to lose its longevity, until they eventually settled on living about a century each, given they were healthy.
All across the ages, many more humans emerged, these ones who had within them the distant memory of the story of Adam, and of all their fathers. Millions of descendants split apart and started to travel all over the world, many of them brothers parting ways to prevent themselves from killing one another. For the story of Cain and Abel lived on in all men, and many a man could not see that his brother was a champion like him, and that they should work together.
So tribes split apart and formed new nations, and eventually they covered the whole earth, then invented a means by which to fly higher than eagles and faster than hawks, and they started swarming all over the planet like a hive of busy bees.
In times long past, our ancestors were brought a great NEW story from a land far to the East. This story was so powerful, and came from so far away, that it captured the hearts and minds of all of the lands of Europe, and it grew and grew and became mighty. It became a new great civilisation, which toppled older ones and continued to spread. The people of this Church believed that a man called Jesus of Nazareth was the NEW Adam, come to reconcile us with our first Father, by freeing us from the sin, the shame, and the fear that we remembered and so often gave in to. He freed us by forgiving us, and teaching us that we did indeed have a first Father, who rules over all creation from a great throne beyond time and space. He taught us that our Father wants each of these champions, each of these amazing stories who have come to life by their sheer WILL, and by the accumulated memories of their fathers, each of whom was still also the best of the best of two hundred million seeds in one single battlefield, among only a handful of battlefields that would ever be available to his Father in his whole life, He wants each of us to love one another, and honour one another.
Five hundred years ago, the lands of our European Christian peoples were in great strife. There were religious wars abounding, as the Church of Jesus was dividing once again. Brother turned on brother. They thought of many great reasons for these conflicts, but they were unable to let the Gospel of brotherly love that Jesus had given them prevail. They were consumed by the vengeful spirit of Cain. Many were killed. And there were great plagues in these times too, which killed many, many more.
Very few family lines survived. Many were lost forever, especially the poor who had no great names, nor great wealth, nor who left behind the stories of greet deeds. The humble, the meek, the forgotten. Only the strong, and the clever, and the wise survived. The strong survived because they could fight, or they could resist illness. The clever survived because they created new sciences and new tools, even knew weapons and new ideas, to change their environment to be safer for them. The wise survived by carrying forward the stories of their fathers, and by writing them down, and by never forgetting the hard lessons learned so many generations ago. They kept old knowledge alive. These three groups lived, and they became the new men. Champion survivors once again.
Among these survivors were one million people who lived in that time five centuries ago, and some of them were men, and some of them were women. The men planted their seeds in the women, and five hundred thousand babies were born. Then this generation met its partners and they had babies, and they had babies, and they had babies, and they had babies.
Five hundred years later, the world looked very different, but from those million people came twenty generations of families, who spread out and made new lines and new nations, including in the land where we live today. One day, a child was born to a man in a great southern land. He said “behold, a son!” and that became the name of his firth born, Ruben.
Ruben was the culmination of all his fathers and mothers. In just the last five hundred years, twenty generations of couples lived who had children and taught their children well enough, both through egg and seed, and through the stories they TOLD them, to survive and have their own babies. ALL of them did. Every single one of those people lived long enough to have a child, and among Ruben’s ancestors were each of those children. All told, in just these five centuries, Ruben had two million ancestors. But right back at the start was Adam, the first man, and his sons, Cain and Abel. They were the first champions. Ruben, and all the children of his generation became the newest champions. Every person that lived in Ruben’s line was a winner. Every person who lived behind the stories of every child, was a winner. There were many, many losers, but none of them in Ruben’s lines. An unfathomable number of those who did not rise to the challenge of life sufficiently to leave a story behind, disappeared. They were loved in their time, by other people, and most especially by Jesus’s father, God. But by man, in the end, they were forgotten. Their stories ended.
But Ruben’s story continues.
One day, little Ruben was told that inside his mother’s belly, a new child was growing. His father James didn’t know what to tell him, other than that it was exciting and good news for everybody! But the little dude of light named Luca arrived, and Ruben didn’t feel like he was exactly good news. He was very cute. But he needed lots of his mother’s attention, and Ruben wasn’t finished with her yet! This wasn’t right. Ruben knew he was the special one. He was the one-in-two-hundred-million seed; the one-in-a-billion-trillion humans; the culmination of countless generations of overcome struggle by his forefathers. How could this little Luca baby be more important to his parents than he?
But Ruben had the story wrong.
James was a son of Adam, and he too carried the shame and fear of the mistake Adam made, deeply buried in himself. James was a man of sin, prideful and soft, weakened by a life of ease, and so certain that everything would be fine because he was clever. But he wasn’t wise or strong yet, and he didn’t know this story of man, nor how to teach it to his son, and Ruben began to feel the spirit of Cain rising in him. He didn’t want to. He knew these feelings of anger and resentment were wrong, and he could imagine a perfect day, with his family perfectly loving each other, but he seldom experienced it. For his mother also carried the story of Eve, and all those generations of struggle and fear and shame.
But in two thousand years, Jesus hadn’t gone away. The story still captured the hearts and minds of those it truly reached, and it reached the generation of James like a cool breeze ahead of a rising tsunami.
Jesus was coming BACK.
The new Adam, the second son of God on Earth, but His first and only begotten son in Eternity was coming back to restore the hearts and minds of all mankind. As the men of James’s generation awoke, they began to see that the story of their loving Father God had been deliberately taken from them, stolen from them, and it had left them surviving and living in ease, but no longer strong, clever or wise. And they realised they were no longer led by leaders who were strong or wise, but those wicked leaders were certainly were very clever, and had many gadgets, tools, and devilish tricks to rule over the people. They were able to make most people believe they were better off being ruled this way. They tricked the people with false stories and many lies to make the children of Adam forget their fathers, even to hate and revile their fathers, and believe their fathers to be lesser men than they.
James and his brothers realised that the world was very much like it had become under the evil sons of Cain. They realised the world was not much better than in the times of Jesus, when the Romans ruled over all the known world, and the Pharisees made them hang Jesus from the cross.
The generation of James realised the story I have just told you. They realised that THEY were champions, the best of the best of the best, but they had been born into a prison, where they were held back, and constantly told lies and given new gadgets to make them weaker, less inventive, and foolish. And the generation of James told their sons this hidden secret – that they too were great! That their people had its own story, that they must remember, and never let anyone else take away. That they were the mighty descendants of conquerors, but more than that, they were custodians of an even more mighty story, the story of Jesus, and His light.
James’s generation became the first Champions of the Light, and they taught their sons, and James helped Ruben to overcome the spirit of Cain, and James and Ruben helped Luca to grow into a mighty man, and the three of them, great father and two great sons, fought many battles side by side and conquered their corner of the world together. They did it with love for each other, and love and forgiveness for all of their mothers and fathers, and above all, love for the great and all powerful first Father, who is the maker of the scroll upon which the whole book of life is written.
Once they regained their story, Ruben never forgot how special he truly was in his father’s eyes, and he had many sons and daughters, as did his brothers, and they became the founders of a new and great nation of men, who treated each other with love and kindness and who lifted each other up and each did their part to build a great new Kingdom, fit for the return of the coming King, Jesus Christ.
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