Beginning and ending

In his book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey encourages people who would be effective to begin with the end in mind and uses the example of living life so that what your best friend would say at your funeral about you would be what you would want them to say. The book isn't "Christian" but that principle should matter to us. In thinking about knowing and living, it is important for us to consider the end as we begin.

We tend to spend more time asking the question the Talking Heads asked in the song, "Once in a Lifetime," "How did I get here?" That question is an important one because it measures whether what we have done to date is working or not, but once the analysis is done, we either need a new plan or we need to keep working the old plan. Too often, especially when we aren't pleased with the answer to that question, we fail to move on, spending our time on regret and self-pity or self-loathing.

We don't have the details re creation and exactly what it looked like for God to create. The answer to the question, "How did I get here?" is simply that God created me to be here at this moment in time in this particular place (see Acts 17.26-27). What is more important than knowing the mechanics of it all is knowing the end of it all, where am I going and how do I get there. That is the part the first pair of humans got wrong, being like God in knowledge requires God's help, not some fruit.