What We Broke

The beginning of the Bible is a love story, and like a lot of love stories, there is a place in it that breaks your heart.

At the start, God walked with the man and the woman in the garden in the cool of the day. Stay on that phrase a moment. The cool of the day is not when you hold a meeting. It is the easy hour, the unhurried evening, when someone who loves you comes to be with you because there is nowhere He would rather be. And there was nothing between them.

"The man and his wife were both naked, and they were not ashamed." — Genesis 2:25 (NET)

To be naked and unashamed is to be wholly seen and wholly safe at once. To have nothing to hide and no reason to hide it. That is what the garden was. That is what love, before anything breaks it, makes possible — to be fully known and not have to cover a single thing.

Then came the reaching. You know the story. They took the one thing that was not theirs to take — reached to decide for themselves what was good and what was evil, instead of trusting the One who is good. And the very first thing that happened afterward was not a thunderclap and not a speech.

It was hiding.

"Then the eyes of both of them opened, and they knew they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves." — Genesis 3:7 (NET)

They covered themselves. Then they hid among the trees. And God came walking in the garden in the cool of the day — still coming, do you see it, still looking for them — and He called out, Where are you? He knew where they were. He was not asking for their location. He was asking the question that has been hanging over the whole human race ever since. Where are you? What happened to us? Why are you hiding from Me?

The likeness did not die that day. You still carry it. But it stopped working the way it was made to. The mirror that was turned toward God, made to catch and throw back His love, spun around to face itself. And the worst of what was lost was not the garden, or the easy evenings. The worst of what was lost was the ability to love the way we were built to love — freely, without fear, without keeping the books.

That is why even our best love is such a tangle. We love when it pays. We love for a while and then tire. We hold back the part that costs too much. The likeness in us is strong enough that we still ache for love, and broken enough that we keep bending it out of true. We are mirrors that remember we were made to shine, and cannot quite manage it on our own anymore.

That is the trouble God set out to mend. And here is the surprise of the whole thing — He did not mend it by making love smaller, by lowering the bar to something we could clear. He mended it by coming down into the middle of the wreck, and teaching us love from the inside.