When All Was Perfect…

When I began working on the First Chronicle, it came out of a time where I was studying Genesis with a group of other women, specifically the first three chapters.  And I found myself wondering what it would have been like to watch as God created everything from nothing.  What were the angels thinking when they heard God speak things into existence?  What would it have been like to then watch God create a race of beings that He loved so much that He placed His breath and His image within them from the start. 

Then I noticed that on the first day of creation, God created Light and Darkness and He called it good.  He called darkness good.  Then He created Day and Night.  And again, night was good.

In our experience, night and darkness often carry a quiet tension. Even in peaceful moments, there’s an undercurrent to it—uncertainty, vulnerability, the sense that something might be hidden just beyond sight. We instinctively associate both with the concepts of evil, danger, death and corruption.

But if we take Genesis seriously, darkness itself is not treated as an enemy at the beginning. It exists within the order God calls good. Which means that, in its original form, night was not something to fear.  Instead, as with light, there has to be a reason (and a blessing) that goes along with it.

So, I began the journey of processing the concepts of What does it actually mean for something to be “good”?

Not good in the sense of pleasant or beautiful, but good in the sense Scripture points to—complete, ordered, aligned with its Maker. A kind of goodness where nothing is at war with itself, and nothing is misused or misplaced.

That idea began to shape everything.

Because if the First Chronicle is going to show the world before the fall, then it has to show more than beauty. It has to show rightness. A world in which everything is functioning as it was intended.

In the First Chronicle, I’ve tried to lean into that. For instance, night is a covering—a place of rest, of restoration, of quiet. It holds space for dreams, for healing, for stillness and contemplation.

Day, in the same way, is not harsh or demanding. It is not something that drains or overwhelms. It is life-giving in a way that does not exhaust. It calls things into motion, but never at the cost of their well-being.  Until Adam ate the fruit I don’t think he ever looked up at the morning sun and thought “dang it, another work day.”

In both cases, what we see now—our fatigue, our fear, our tension—is not what these things were meant to produce. Rather, those things came about when the “good” got corrupted and pulled out of alignment with God’s initial intent.  And that idea extends far beyond day and night.

One of the things I’ve been reflecting on as I’ve written is how often Scripture presents what we would call “strengths” as both gifts and potential points of failure.

Authority can become control.

Desire can become consumption.

Discernment can become suspicion.

Strength can become domination.

The same capacity that allows something to function beautifully in alignment can, when bent even slightly, begin to unravel into something destructive.

That has shaped a lot of how I think about the characters and the world itself.

In the First Chronicle, I’m not just trying to show what things are—I’m trying to hint at what they are meant for. Because later, when things begin to fracture, the break won’t come from nowhere. It will come from something that was once good being turned just enough to distort its purpose.

I’m not diving fully into that process yet—that deserves its own space, and I plan to write about it more directly later. But it’s been sitting underneath everything I’ve written so far.

For now, the focus is simpler, and in some ways, more difficult:

To linger in a world where nothing has gone wrong yet.

To slow down long enough to let that reality settle in. Not as a backdrop, but as something the reader can almost feel. Something that feels both unfamiliar and strangely recognizable at the same time.

I’m building a world of “perfection” so that when the fracture comes—and it will—it doesn’t just register as plot development.

It feels like loss.

And more than that, it awakens longing.

Not just for the world of the story to be restored, but for something deeper—for things to be made right again. For rest to be safe again. For strength to be good without becoming harmful. For love to exist without the tension of breaking.  For a reunion between creator and creation.

That longing within us, is not accidental.

Scripture points us toward a future that is not merely an escape from what is broken, but a restoration of what was always intended. Not a new idea, but the fulfillment of an original design.

And that hope sits quietly beneath everything in the First Chronicle.

Because the story doesn’t end in its fall.

It moves—slowly, sometimes painfully—toward a return.

Toward a moment when the Voice restores what was once whole.

And when that happens, my hope is that it won’t feel distant or unfamiliar.

It will feel like something we’ve been waiting for.

Something we recognize, even if we’ve never fully known it.

Something like coming home.