Four in the Garden takes place in a primordial world, before rules and before religion. There is no church, no organized system of worship, no predefined code of conduct. Just God. I found this the ideal setting to depict God because I could describe a relationship with God without all the trappings of religion or culture or history. I could depict this relationship in a pure form as it ought to be portrayed. In its writing, I was careful to avoid words that are religiously loaded terms such as God, faith and sin.

I wanted to show what a relationship with God might look like, complete with the full range of emotions that accompany any meaningful relationship. We experience joy and disappointment,  understanding and frustration in human relationships and our relationship with God is no different. I believe that our relationship with God develops in the same way as our other relationships develop, as we learn to task risks, be honest and trust more and more. We have setbacks. We misunderstand. We get angry. But if we value the relationship, we work through those issues and hopefully grow closer.

People seem to either love or hate Brussels sprouts. People who hate them made that determination because they have tried them at least once in their lives. Then you have those people who have spurned God because they tried that once, too, and they didn’t like it or it didn’t work for them. But I wonder what it was they tried.

When people reject God, often they are rejecting their perception of God. That perception is based on upbringing, religious teaching, church/temple experience, and encounters with religious people. How many people have actually encountered God directly? Many of those who fall in that category would say the experience was positive.

Pure Relationship with God

In writing Four in the Garden, I tried to present a relationship with God in the purest form possible, stripping away religious and man-made obstacles. The ideal I aimed for was to give people a direct experience with God.

One person reading the book explained his surprise at being presented with a relationship with God that he found workable, one that he had never considered before. He is struggling to know what to do with that information. I suppose that if a person is being shown an open door, then he must make a decision whether to walk through it.