Over a century ago as America
was embarking forward into the global phenomenon of the Industrial
Revolution, a young man from New England ventured into the nearby
woods to learn a lesson of personal worth that he felt might soon
be lost in an ever increasing complex society. At stake was man's
ability to access his proper role within the Creation.
He recorded in "Walden" a brief
but famous entry stating his mission as, "I went to the woods because
I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts
of life, and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach...." Thoreau
is long dead, but the call, the "echo of God's voice" within the
creation is still there today that we might learn a valuable truth.
The call goes back to the beginning of creation when God placed Adam
in the garden and instructed the first human "to dress and keep it." This
job description is recorded in Genesis 2:15. Adam's job was humanity's
first assignment, even before naming the animals, or "multiplying
and replenishing the earth." The job was twofold in nature. One was
to dress the garden which denotes an action of creative effort, but
notice the other side of the commission which has a visionary "beyond
the moment" aspect-"to keep it." From the beginning preservation was
a demand within the relationship between God and man.
The First Job
Recently a reporter named Roger
Rosenblatt went one better than Thoreau. He traversed the jungles
of South America to record the life work of Russell Mittermeier-
one man who is succeeding for the moment in responding to the "first
job." In his article "Into the Woods," which appeared in the December
14 issue of Time, Mr. Rosenblatt begins by stating his own
wilderness encounter. "It takes a moment to realize what I am seeing:
A monkey in a tree. To be specific, it is a black spider monkey swinging
through the topmost branches of a ceiba tree in the rain forest in
Suriname, the former Dutch Guyana, north of Brazil.
