Part 1: Enrolled in the Wrong School

Easter Series 2026

“The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” — Genesis 2:15

Do you remember the first day of school? Not the anxiety of it — the anticipation. The new backpack. The sharpened pencils. The quiet excitement of walking into a room where you didn’t yet know the rules, but you were ready to learn them. There was something pure in that. You weren’t there to win yet. You were just there to discover.

Do you remember when that changed? It probably wasn’t a single moment. More like a slow shift in the background. At some point the learning became about the grade. The grade became about the rank. The rank became about the next door it would open. And by the time you were building a career, the original curiosity had been quietly replaced by something else — a drive that looked like ambition but felt, underneath, a lot like survival.

Think about that for a moment. When did you stop learning because you loved it, and start performing because you needed to?

Before you answer that, go back further. Much further.

Genesis 2 describes a scene that is easy to read past — but slow down and notice what is actually happening. God places the man in a garden that is already flourishing. The rivers are already flowing. The trees are already bearing fruit. Before a single task is assigned, provision is established. The garden is not a problem to be solved. It is a gift to be inhabited.

Then God gives the man work — “to tend it and keep it.” Two Hebrew words: abad, to serve, and shamar, to guard and protect. This is not the language of conquest or acquisition. It is the language of care. The man is not building something from nothing. He is stewarding something that belongs to Another. His role is defined not by what he can produce, but by the faithfulness with which he tends what God has already provided.

Notice what is completely absent from this scene: anxiety. There is no scarcity to manage, no competition to outperform, no quota to hit. The work is real and meaningful — but it is held inside a relationship of complete trust. God provides. The man tends. That is the original design.

Now read what enters in Genesis 3 — and notice it doesn’t arrive as obvious rebellion. It arrives as a question: “Did God really say…?” A seed of doubt about God’s provision, God’s goodness, God’s word. And the moment that trust broke, everything changed. Scarcity replaced provision. Striving replaced stewardship. The man who had been a steward became a survivor.

That is not just ancient history. That is the operating system every human being is born into.

The survival curriculum — compete, produce, prove, protect — wasn’t something you designed. You were born into a world already running it. It was in the structure of the classroom before you arrived. It was in the culture of every organization you joined. It was so present, so consistent, so rewarded, that it stopped feeling like a system and started feeling like reality.

The theologian Walter Brueggemann observed that anxiety is the engine that keeps this system running. Not occasional anxiety — structural anxiety. The kind that gets rebranded as drive, as ambition, as responsibility. The higher you climb, the more sophisticated it becomes. You stop recognizing it as fear. It just feels like what good leaders carry.

The survival curriculum produces real results. Real competence, real achievement, real measurable progress. That’s what makes it so convincing. But it cannot give you what you were actually built for — because it was never designed to. It was designed to keep you moving, not to bring you home.

You were never meant to master survival. You were meant to practice trust. To tend faithfully what belongs to God, not scramble desperately to secure what you’re afraid of losing. That’s not a metaphor. That’s the original curriculum — and it’s still available.

Here is what the Garden was always trying to teach: trust is not a feeling or a personality trait. It is a curriculum. A practiced, daily, lived-out skill — the capacity to tend faithfully, rest fully, and work freely inside a relationship where God is the provider and you are the steward. That is what was lost. And that is what this series is about finding again.

Reflection

• Do you remember a specific moment when learning shifted into performing for you? What changed?
• Where in your life does anxiety feel like responsibility rather than a warning signal?
• What would it mean to be a steward of your work rather than the owner of it?