This is a story from my book Taming the Dragons: Powerful Choices for Women in Conflict and Pain, a HarperSanFrancisco original soon to be republished by Redemption Press.

►TWO - INNOCENT: We Do Not Live in the Garden of Eden Anymore, Yet We Like To Pretend We Do. 
“Is there really a dragon out there?”  - Eve the Innocent

Christine 1974

So now, since you have been made right in God’s sight by faith in His promises, we can have real peace with him because of what Jesus Christ our Lord has done for us.

For because of our faith, He has brought us into His place of highest privilege where we now stand, and we confidently and joyfully look forward to actually becoming all that God has had in mind for us to be.

We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials for we know that they are good for us—they help us learn to be patient.

And patience develops strength of character in us and helps us trust God more each time we use it until finally our hope and faith are strong and steady. Then, when that happens, we are able to hold our heads high no matter what happens and know that all is well, for we know how dearly God loves us, and we feel this warm love everywhere within us because God has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with His love. - Romans 5:1-5 (LB)

MY COUSINS WERE ALMOST HOME, pushing their bikes up the last of the hill. It was a winter evening early in the new year of 1974, and a slight drizzle hurried them along: Patty, thirteen, Christine, eleven. Lights from the kitchen window could be seen through the trees. Suddenly, a car driven by a young man blinded by the setting sun came gunning up over the ridge. Patty ran the half block home screaming. Uncle Stan, the town doctor, was paged. Christine had been in an accident.

Seventeen hundred miles away and a few days later, I came home late from work. A letter from my folks was in the mailbox. “I’m sorry to be the one to break the news,” my mother wrote, “but Christine was killed today while riding her bike home for supper.”

I let the letter fall to the floor, my eyes automatically sliding to the wall where I’d hung a small hooked rug Christine and I had made together a few summers before. It was all I had of my sweet little cousin. “Oh, Christine,” I wept, tears stinging the moment I buried my face into the dusty wool and cried into her careful work. She was dead—why? Such needless, pointless death! I was inconsolable for days.

Then came a second letter from my mother. “Uncle Stan,” she wrote, “went into Christine’s room after everything was over and sat down at the new little table he’d gotten her for Christmas. Her Bible was open. She’d been reading it before going off to school that morning, and she’d underlined the first five verses of Romans 5.”

So now, since we have been made right in God’s sight by faith in his promises, we can have real peace with him because of what Jesus Christ our Lord has done for us …

Christine spoke from heaven. Evil receded. 

... we are able to hold our heads high no matter what happens and know that all is well, for we know how dearly God loves us … (LV)

Evil slid back further, finally to vanish in the victory of God’s ultimate promise. We are not without hope, even though none of us live in the Garden of Eden anymore.