Mateo watches from the foliage as Adam and Eve marvel at the beauty of the Garden of Eden, unaware of the dark serpent observing them from a nearby tree.
Every reader knows the name.
The Garden of Eden.
We have read about it. We have imagined it. Artists have tried to paint it for centuries.
But no one can tell us exactly what it looked like.
That presented me with an interesting challenge when I began writing Mateo and the Secrets of the Eternal Word.
I wasn't simply going to tell Mateo about Eden.
I was going to send him there.
And suddenly I had to see the Garden through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy from the mountains of Nicaragua.
What would he notice first?
The trees? The animals? The rivers?
Would there be sounds he had never heard before? Colors he had never seen? Would everything seem strangely peaceful?
And then there were Adam and Eve.
I didn't want Mateo to meet two people who already understood the world around them. They were experiencing it for the first time.
Imagine opening your eyes and discovering sunlight.
Imagine seeing an animal without knowing what an animal was.
Imagine touching water, smelling a flower, hearing a bird sing—or looking into another person's eyes—when everything was new.
There was something wonderfully innocent about that idea.
For Mateo, however, there was another side to Eden.
He knew the story.
Adam and Eve didn't.
Mateo could look at the beauty surrounding them and understand something they could not possibly know.
Something was coming.
Somewhere in that perfect Garden was the serpent.
That gave me one of the most interesting perspectives in the book. Mateo wasn't merely witnessing Bible history. Sometimes he knew what was going to happen before the people living it did.
He could see the danger.
But could he change anything?
That question became important throughout Mateo's journeys with Verbum Aeternum.
If Mateo was truly witnessing Bible history, then the events he saw had already happened. He wasn't there to rewrite them.
He was there to experience them, learn from them, and eventually understand why they mattered.
Perhaps that is one reason Eden was the right place for Mateo's first journey.
It gave him—and me—the opportunity to look at a familiar Bible story differently.
Not from a distance.
Not from an illustration in a children's Bible.
But through the eyes of a boy standing among the trees, watching two people discover a beautiful new world...
while knowing that somewhere in the Garden, trouble was already waiting.
