Hiding

Six o’clock in the evening.

The workday is mostly over, or it’s supposed to be. The phone is still face up on the counter, and something on it could still need you before bed. Supper is somewhere between an idea and a pan on the stove. It’s a long way to morning from here.

A lot of us are on watch.

Not in a dramatic way. Nobody would call it that. It’s the habit of checking the phone before your feet hit the floor. Running tomorrow’s meeting in the shower. Knowing where the money is, where the kids are, what the doctor might say, which person in the family is about to be upset and how to head it off. Keeping things together, because somebody has to.

It works, mostly. That’s the trouble with it. Watchfulness pays. Things that are watched go better than things that aren’t. So the watch goes on, and somewhere along the way rest starts to feel like a risk nobody can afford. Relax when it’s handled. Have peace when it’s fixed.

This book is about the possibility that peace doesn’t work that way.

The oldest story in the Bible about what went wrong between people and God is very short, and the first thing it does after things break is surprising.

It starts in a garden. Two people, a man and a woman, living in a good place with everything they need. One line describes them before anything goes wrong, and it’s an odd line to put first. The man and his wife were both naked, and they were not ashamed.

Nothing to hide. Nothing to manage. Nobody watching anybody.

Then they do the one thing they were told not to do. The story calls it eating from a tree. You can read that as history or as picture. Either way, the next thing that happens is the part worth seeing.

The eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; so they sewed together fig leaves and made coverings for themselves.

The very first thing human beings did when something went wrong was cover up. Not fix it. Cover it. And when they heard God coming, walking in the garden in the cool of the day, they went further. They hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.

That’s the first picture the Bible gives of people after the trouble starts. Two of them behind a tree, holding leaves in place, listening.

And then God speaks. The first question in the whole Bible is this one.

Where are you?

It’s worth noticing who’s looking for whom. The ones who did wrong are hiding. The one who was wronged is out walking, calling their names. Whatever you believe about God, that’s not how most of us would have written it. We’d have written the people coming out to apologize. The story has God coming to find them.

The man answers with a sentence that a lot of people could have said this morning.

I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself.

Afraid. Exposed. Hidden. Three words, and most of the rest of the Bible is about them.

Here is what this book is built on.

Most of us were taught that peace comes at the end, once the problem is solved. In the old stories it almost never does. Over and over, peace shows up while the trouble is still there: the army still in the valley, the boy still on the bed, the storm still up. And it comes as something said to a person, usually by a voice they weren’t expecting, not as a calm they managed to work up on their own.

That’s the whole idea. The rest of the book is just the stories.

There are twelve of them. Each chapter names something a lot of us believe about peace, the kind of thing nobody says out loud because it seems too obvious to say. You can’t rest until it’s handled. Keeping the peace means keeping quiet. You have to earn your way back. Then an old story pushes on it.

You don’t have to know any of these stories already. Each one is told from the beginning, with whatever you’d need to follow it. You don’t have to believe them, either. Some of them have miracles in them, and the book tells them the way the record does without arguing about it. Read them the way you’d listen to someone at a kitchen table telling you what happened to a friend. Decide later what you think.

Each chapter comes with one small thing to do. Small on purpose. The people in these stories rarely did anything big. A woman poured out what she’d been holding. A tired man ate some bread and slept. A frightened farmer built a small altar and named the place. That was enough to start with.

The book runs through one night. On a ship the night is split into watches, so nobody has to stand all of it, and the stories go watch by watch from this evening hour to first light. Read it straight through, or go to the hour you’re awake in, or to the trouble you’re in.

A word about who’s telling them. I spent twenty-five years on church staffs and left in 2006. I’m not writing as anybody’s pastor, and I’m not writing from the far side of having figured this out. I’m passing these stories along the way you’d hand a friend a book you couldn’t stop thinking about.

One last thing about that garden.

After the hiding and the questions, there’s a line that’s easy to miss, because it comes right after some hard news about what life outside the garden was going to cost. Before they leave, God makes them clothes. And the LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife, and He clothed them.

They had covered themselves with leaves. He covered them with something that would last.

They still had to leave the garden. The trouble was real, and it didn’t go away. But the first thing God did about their shame was not to shout at them for it. It was to dress them for the road.