Wandering in the Land of Nod.

Of all the things to raise questions in the first few chapters of the Bible, the first story that left me with numerous questions as a child was the story of Cain being sent to the Land of Nod.

Up to this point, only four people were known to exist on Earth. Now we were being introduced to what appears to be a new country.

To add to the sudden appearance of a country, o woman shows up to become Cain’s wife.

For my young mind, this was too much to process. I needed some help from the adults in the church. For me, the best one to answer these questions would be my Sunday School teacher. She seemed to know everything about the Bible and would be sure to give me the answers that would lead me to the truth.

Getting to church on Sunday, I was ready to get my answers.

After the prayer to open our class, we got underway. A quick reading of a Bible story, followed by some expounding and explaining what it meant for us and our lives. From there we had some discussion about how what we had just learned could be put to use in our young lives.

After we had finished coming up with reason the lesson was relevant to us, we moved into the part I had been anxiously waiting on. It was time to discuss what we had been reading in the Bible over the course of the previous week.

As usual, most of the boys in my all-male class had not found time to pick up their Bibles. The couple that had only had a brief report on what book and chapters they had read.

When the teacher got to me, I had my Bible open and was ready to get some answers.

Letting the teacher know I had been reading the Book of Genesis; I launched into my questions.

To say my teacher was not quite prepared for my inquiries would be one way to put it. The perplexed look on her face when I asked her how the Land of Nod had come to exist and have people living in it was far outside the normal softball questions she faced from the kids that rarely cracked open their Bibles.

To give herself time to process what she had been asked to explain, she picked up her Bible and went to the story herself. As she read it over, everyone in the room could see I had brought up a subject that was not easy to explain. There was no brushing this off as a misunderstanding of what was being read. She was going to have to come up with an actual answer.

After reading it over, she began to go into an explanation of how Adam and Eve had many other children that were not named in the Bible, and many of these children had moved away from the place their parents lived and began living their own lives.

It was one of these sisters that Cain married and began his family with.

This was far from what I had wanted to be told. From the reaction of the other boys in the class, they were all with me. What kind of sick person would marry their sister one of them asked.

The door that our teacher had tried to keep closed had just been kicked wide open. If she had wanted to avoid the incest topic, there was no way that was going to happen now. All she could do was try and put a sanitized spin on it.

She began to explain how at this point in history the human race was much more pure due to the recent creation of the world and the human race by God. The reasons that people cannot marry close relatives today did not exist at this time due to pureness of these people.

By the time the class ended, and the discussion came to an end, I was no closer to having a satisfactory answer than I was before I arrived.

When I brought these questions up to my parents, they didn’t have any better answers. It seemed to me that anyone that had a question about the Bible that was not clearly explained by the story was given some lame answer that was far from answering the question.

As I thought about it more, I came to understand that none of these people had a way to explain the fact there was a new country that seemed to appear out of nowhere.

The adults in my life did their best to steer me away from my questioning. As I got older, I came to realize this was because their beliefs could not stand up to the questions of a child. It was easier to ignore these questions and redirect the conversation back to the points they wanted to focus on.

As more questions arose in my mind, I was always given a lame answer if the question was raised to one of the adults in my life.

This aversion to questions made me more determined to ask even more questions. There was no way I could go through life blindly accepting things that did not make sense. My life of question the senseless stories of the Bible did not stop there.