Most of us have sung I Surrender All without much resistance.

The melody is familiar. The words come easily on a Sunday morning, carried along by the tune, comfortable in the company of other voices. We mean them when we sing them. We just don't always know what they mean until something happens that shows us how tightly we were actually holding on.

Judson Van DeVenter didn't write that hymn from a place of easy peace. He believed in God but struggled for five years over whether to trust God with his own plans. He was a gifted artist and teacher, and he knew it. Friends urged him toward full-time ministry. He resisted. He held on. For five years he held on, until finally he let go. The words came later, during an evangelistic meeting he was conducting, born from a surrender that was already behind him. All to Jesus I surrender, all to Him I freely give.

These were not words composed in calm. They were wrung out of a real surrender. And that matters.

Because most of us don't arrive at surrender through quiet reflection. We arrive at it when life makes holding on impossible. Illness has a way of doing that. So does grief, and loss, and the sudden unraveling of everything we thought we controlled. Hard things force open hands we didn't even know were closed.

There is a temptation, in those moments, to call what we are feeling resignation, a slumping of the shoulders, a giving up. But resignation and surrender are not the same thing. Resignation says I have no choice. Surrender says I choose to trust the One whose hands can carry what mine were never strong enough to hold. The difference is everything.

Inspired by the Spirit, Paul captures the difference in Romans 12:1 when he makes the call to offer ourselves as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. A living sacrifice is not a passive one. It is not a man or woman lying limp under the weight of circumstance. It is a deliberate, ongoing, costly act of the will made in the full knowledge of what it requires. It is worship. Paul calls it exactly that: your spiritual worship.

This is what the hymn is doing. It is not a song of defeat. It is a song of active, willful release, the kind that can only be sung by someone who understands what is being given up, and gives it anyway.

And here is the grace at the center of it: the refrain does not end with what is being surrendered. It ends with my blessed Savior. Whatever you are releasing, whether it is your timeline, your plans, your grip on outcomes you were never truly holding anyway, you are releasing it into hands that were pierced for you. That is not resignation. That is the most defiant act of faith a human being can make.

Humbly at His feet. Freely given. Wholly His.

I surrender all.

There is no safer place to land.

Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet, saying to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. And he said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus wept. Then the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” - John 11:32–36 (ESV)

There is a verse in the Bible so brief that a child can memorize it in thirty seconds. Sunday school teachers have used it for generations as the perfect memory verse for the youngest students in their classes. Two words. Nine letters. A complete sentence. And yet, in the history of human literature, in the long sweep of everything that has ever been written down on parchment or paper or screen, there may be no two words more weighted with meaning, more saturated with glory, more startling in their theological depth than these: Jesus wept.

Don’t let their familiarity rob them of their power. Sit here for a moment. Stay in Bethany. Feel the grief hanging in the air like a heavy cloud that hasn’t broken yet. Smell the burial spices. Hear the sound of mourning. And watch the Son of God, who spoke the universe into existence and holds all things together by the power of His Word, stand at the graveside of His friend and let the tears fall.

This is one of the most important passages in all of the New Testament, not because it tells us the most about what Jesus can do, but because it tells us everything about who Jesus is.

The scene begins with Mary. If you know your New Testament, you know that Mary of Bethany has a habit of ending up at the feet of Jesus. In Luke 10, she sat at His feet to listen. In John 12, she would anoint His feet with costly perfume. And here in John 11, she falls at His feet in grief. She is a woman who knows where to bring the full weight of her life - the wondering, the worshiping, and the weeping - and it is always to the same place.

She says to Him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

Her sister Martha had said nearly the same words just moments before, in verse 21. Some commentators have suggested that these two sisters had likely said this to one another many times over the four days since Lazarus died. It was the sentence that haunted the house. If only He had come sooner. If only He had been here.

There is raw, real, human grief in these words. But there is also faith. These women are not abandoning their belief in Jesus. They are bringing their confusion to Jesus. They don’t understand why He delayed. They don’t know what He is about to do. But they fall at His feet anyway. They address Him as Lord. Even in the middle of their sorrow, they are still looking to Him.

That is one of the most important things I can tell you today. The goal of the Christian life is not to never grieve. The goal is to grieve in the right direction, to grieve toward Christ, not away from Him. Mary’s tears did not drive her from Jesus. They drove her to Him. And when you are in the valley, when the phone rings with news you never wanted to hear, when the doctor’s report changes everything, don’t run from Him. Fall at His feet. That is exactly where He wants you.

Now watch what happens next, because this is where the passage becomes almost breathtaking in its intimacy.

Verse 33 tells us: “When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled.”

The Greek word translated “deeply moved” is a word that carries within it the idea of an inward groan, a stirring at the very core of one’s being. It is not a polite, restrained, dignified emotional response. This is visceral. This is deep. The Son of God looked upon the grief of Mary and the mourners surrounding her and something moved in Him at a level that language barely reaches.

And then He asked, “Where have you laid him?”

They said, “Lord, come and see.”

And Jesus wept.

Now, some people have read this passage and tried to explain away the tears. They’ve suggested that Jesus was weeping over their unbelief, or that He was troubled by the presence of death in a world that was never meant to know it, or that He grieved because He knew what Lazarus had experienced in paradise and now had to call him back into the suffering of this world. And there may well be layers of theological truth in all of those observations. But don’t let any of them become an excuse to explain away the simplest, most straightforward, most beautiful truth right here on the surface: Jesus wept because He loved Lazarus, and Mary, and Martha. The crowd saw it immediately. They said, in verse 36, “See how he loved him!”

They were right. This was love made visible in tears.

I want to spend a moment here, because I think this is the pastoral heart of this passage. And I want to say it as clearly as I know how.

Jesus Christ is not an indifferent sovereign sitting on a distant throne, unmoved by the suffering of His people. He is a person, fully God and fully man, and the tears He shed at the tomb of Lazarus are the tears of one who genuinely, deeply, personally cares about the people He loves.

The writer of Hebrews tells us that we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses. The same Lord who stood in Bethany and wept is the same Lord who sits today at the right hand of the Father and intercedes for you. He has not forgotten what it felt like to weep. He has not moved so far into glory that the pain of His people no longer reaches Him.

Are you grieving today? He knows. Are you confused, like Mary, wondering why God didn’t show up sooner, why the miracle didn’t come in time, why the prayer went unanswered in the way you needed it to be answered? He sees you. Are you standing at a graveside, or sitting in an empty house, or lying awake in the dark with a grief too deep for words? He is not unmoved. He is not untouched. The Bible says He weeps with those who weep.

That is not a minor footnote in the story of the Christian faith. It is at the very heart of the gospel that God did not watch our suffering from a safe distance but entered into it. He came. He stood in Bethany. He wept.

There is one more thing I must tell you, and it is the most important thing of all.

Jesus wept, but Jesus did not stay weeping.

If you keep reading in John 11, just a few verses beyond where our passage ends today, you will find that Jesus stood before the sealed tomb and commanded, with the authority that belongs only to the Creator of life: “Lazarus, come out.” And Lazarus came out.

The tears did not mean defeat. The grief did not mean that God had lost control of the story. The delay did not mean abandonment. Every tear on Mary’s face, every tear on the face of Jesus, every bit of sorrow in those verses was the darkness just before the dawn.

John tells us in verse 4, at the very beginning of this chapter, that Jesus said of this sickness: “It does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” From the very beginning, Jesus knew where this was going. He knew that Lazarus would walk out of that tomb. He knew that this moment of grief was not the final chapter.

And here is the word I want you to take with you today: whatever tomb you are standing in front of, whatever situation looks sealed, finished, beyond hope, Jesus knows where it is going. He is not surprised by your suffering. He has not been caught off guard by your circumstances. And while He weeps with you in the middle of your pain, He is also, at this very moment, working all things together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.

The same Jesus who wept at the grave of Lazarus is the same Jesus who rose from His own grave on the third day. Death does not have the final word. The tomb is not the end. The last chapter has not been written.

Weep if you need to weep. He will weep with you. But never stop trusting the One whose tears prove His love, and whose resurrection proves His power.

Lord Jesus, thank You for weeping with us. Meet us in our grief, steady us in our confusion, and remind us that no tomb has ever had the final word over You. We trust You with what we cannot understand. Amen.

There is a peace that makes no sense.

Not the peace that comes when the storm passes and the water settles and life finds its footing again. That peace makes perfect sense. We understand that peace. We wait for it, work toward it, pray for it, and when it comes we receive it with gratitude and move on. That is the peace of resolved circumstances. It is real, and it is good, but it is not the peace the Bible is most interested in.

The peace the Bible is most interested in is the other kind. Paul describes it in Philippians 4 as a peace that surpasses all understanding, a peace that stands guard over the heart and mind in Christ Jesus regardless of what the circumstances are doing. Not after the storm. Not instead of the storm. In it. Through it. On the worst water you have ever crossed.

Horatio Spafford knew that water. In November of 1873 he lost all four of his daughters when the steamship Ville du Havre sank in the North Atlantic. His wife survived. As he later crossed the ocean to join her, he wrote words the church has been singing ever since.

When peace like a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul.

Whatever my lot. That is the line. Not when things are good. Not when the grief has lifted and the wounds have closed and life has found its way back to something resembling normal. Whatever my lot. Spafford was not writing from the far side of his suffering. He was writing from inside it, and he was testifying to something that his circumstances had no power to produce and no power to take away.

That is the peace of God. Not the peace of resolved circumstances but the peace of an unshakeable Person. Jesus said plainly in John 14, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you.” The world gives peace by removing the trouble. Christ gives peace by entering it with you.

Spafford knew this. He had lost everything a father can lose, and he sat down over the water and wrote a hymn not because the pain wasn’t real, but because the God who holds us in our pain is more real still.

That is not optimism or resilience, or the power of positive thinking dressed in Christian language. That is a man who had been to the bottom and found that God was already there.

Whatever your lot today — He is already there too.

I want you to notice something that is so easy to read right past that most people never stop long enough to take it in. When those tired, cold, empty-handed disciples climbed out of their boat and dragged themselves onto the shore of the Sea of Tiberias, the Lord Jesus did not meet them with a list of expectations or greet them with a lecture. He did not remind them that they had abandoned Him in His hour of need, that Peter had cursed and denied Him, or that they had all scattered like frightened sheep when the soldiers came.

No. When those men stepped off that boat, what did they find?

A fire already burning. Fish already cooking. Bread already waiting.

He already had the fire going.

I want you to sit with that for a moment, because I believe with all of my heart that this small, almost domestic detail in the Gospel of John is one of the most profound portraits of grace you will find anywhere in the pages of holy Scripture.

The Disciples Had Come Back to Their Old Life

Let’s be honest about what is happening in this passage. These seven disciples who had walked with Jesus for three years had gone back to fishing. A few verses before our passage Simon Peter said, “I am going fishing,” and the others said, “We will go with you.” They went out that night and caught nothing. They had returned to what was familiar, and they had come up empty.

I understand them. I suspect you understand them too. When life has rattled you, when grief has disoriented you, when failure has flattened you, there is a powerful pull back toward what’s familiar, back toward the known, the ordinary, the manageable. These disciples had witnessed the crucifixion. They had seen the risen Lord appear to them not once but twice in the upper room. And still they weren’t quite sure what to do with themselves. So they went fishing.

What they found in the morning was not a reprimand. It was a meal.

He Came to Them; They Did Not Come to Him

The Lord Jesus could have waited for them to come to Him. He could have stood at a distance and called them to give an accounting of themselves. That’s what we might expect from a teacher whose students have disappointed him. That’s what performance-based religion always looks like — you must clean yourself up, get your act together, and then come back into the presence of the one you’ve offended.

But that is not what Jesus did. He came to the shore. He built the fire. He prepared the breakfast. And then, when they were still in the boat, still out on the water, still in the middle of their failure, He called out to them with an almost startling gentleness: “Children, do you have any fish?” (John 21:5). He called them children. That’s tender language. That’s not the language of a judge. That’s the language of a father.

This is the grace of God in action. Theologians often call it prevenient grace. But this grace that arrives before you do, that makes provision before you even know you need it, is not merely a theological category. It is a charcoal fire already burning on a cold morning by a dark lake. It is bread already broken. It is fish already laid on coals before you even arrive.

Paul would write to the Romans that while we were still sinners Christ died for us. Not after we had cleaned up or sufficiently mourned our failures, but while we were still sinners. The Lord Jesus did not wait for Peter to apologize before He prepared his breakfast. The breakfast was ready before Peter’s boat touched the shore.

Peter and the Weight of That Morning

Now think about Simon Peter specifically. This is a man who, just days before, had stood in the courtyard of the high priest warming himself at a charcoal fire, and there, in the flickering light, he denied three times that he ever knew the Lord Jesus. He did not deny Him once in a moment of weakness and then collect himself. He denied Him three times, with increasing force, to servants and bystanders who barely mattered in the grand scheme of what was happening that night.

And now Peter steps off a boat onto the shore of Galilee, and the risen Lord is standing there with breakfast ready. Not a cold shoulder. Not a word about what Peter had done. Just warmth, provision, and welcome.

This tells us something essential about the character of Jesus Christ. The grace He extends is not the grudging grace of someone who forgives but can’t quite forget. It is not the grace of someone who lets you back in the door but makes you feel the weight of what you did every time you enter the room. The Lord Jesus met Peter’s failure with a fire and a meal. He met Peter’s shame with an invitation to come and eat.

Now, the Lord will attend to the full restoration of Peter in the verses that follow, when He asks him three times, “Do you love me?”, but before we leave Peter here we must not miss what this morning scene reveals. Restoration does not begin with interrogation. It begins with grace. It begins with the wounded hands of the risen Lord serving bread to the man who denied He ever knew Him.

That is the gospel. That has always been the gospel.

“Come and Have Breakfast”

Look at what Jesus says to them in verse 12. He does not say, “Sit down, we need to talk.” He does not say, “I think you owe me an explanation.” He says, “Come and have breakfast.”

That is an invitation to grace in the ordinary. It is an invitation to warmth, to food, to fellowship, to the kind of care that says: I know you are cold. I know you are tired. I know you worked all night and came up with nothing. Come. Eat. I have provided.

And then look at what Jesus does in verse 13. He came and took the bread and gave it to them, and so with the fish. This is servant language. This is the same Lord who, on the night before His death, girded Himself with a towel and washed His disciples’ feet. The one who is Lord of all, who holds the keys of death and Hades, who is the firstborn from the dead, the Lamb who was slain, took the bread and He gave it to them.

He served them breakfast.

I don’t think you can read this and miss the echo of the Last Supper, of Jesus taking bread, giving thanks, breaking it, and giving it to His disciples. The communion table and the breakfast table are not so far apart. Every time the Lord meets us in our brokenness and nourishes us with His provision, it is an expression of the same grace of a Savior who became a servant so that we might live.

None of Them Dared Ask Who He Was

There is a line in verse 12 that strikes me every time I read it. John tells us that none of the disciples dared ask Jesus, “Who are you?” They knew it was the Lord.

There is something in the way Jesus came to them — in the fact of the fire, in the tenderness of His voice, in the gesture of His hands as He gave them bread — that made the question unnecessary. They knew. You don’t need a theological argument to know that you are in the presence of the risen Christ when you are sitting across a fire from a grace this undeserved and this complete.

That is still how He makes Himself known. Not always in the dramatic vision or the audible voice, but in the provision you didn’t expect. In the mercy that arrived before you even asked for it. In the warmth of a fire lit for you by a Savior who knew you were coming before you knew you were going, and who made ready for you anyway.

What This Means for You Today

If you are reading this and you feel like one of those disciples in the boat — exhausted, empty, maybe a little ashamed, maybe unsure how to face the Lord after what you’ve done or failed to do — I want you to hear this.

He already has the fire going.

He is not waiting for you to get yourself together before He will receive you. He is not standing on the shore with His arms crossed, waiting for your full accounting. He is standing there with provision already prepared, with grace already extended, with an invitation already on His lips: Come. Come and have breakfast.

The grace of God in Jesus Christ does not begin when you arrive at the right condition. It arrives before you do. It was settled before the foundation of the world, secured by the blood of the cross, sealed by the resurrection, and extended to you right now — right where you are, in whatever boat you’ve climbed back into, after whatever night of empty nets you’ve just come through.

Come to Him. He is not surprised by you. He is not put off by you. He already has the fire going.

Lord Jesus, thank You that Your grace arrives before we do. Forgive us for rowing back to what is familiar when You are already on the shore with provision prepared. Give us faith to step off the boat and come — for we know it is You, and there is nowhere else we would rather be. Amen.

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Made for This

Q: What is the chief end of man?

A: Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.

— Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q&A 1

Most of us were taught that the point of life is to achieve, to serve, to make a difference. The catechism doesn’t disagree, exactly. But it starts somewhere else. With the doing, there is the being. With the serving, there is the enjoying.

That word enjoy stops me every time.

We expect to read “obey” or “honor” or “worship.” Those words carry weight. They sound appropriately serious, appropriately reverent. They match our instinct that the relationship between creature and Creator should feel like duty more than delight. We know how to do duty. We can measure it, report on it, feel reasonably satisfied when we’ve discharged it. Duty is manageable.

But the Shorter Catechism doesn’t offer enjoyment as the reward we receive after we’ve done the serious work of glorifying God. It presents them together, as one thing. Glorifying God and enjoying Him are not sequential. They are simultaneous. They are, in fact, the same motion aimed at the same end.

This should stop us cold.

If the chief end of man is to enjoy God, then a joyless Christianity is not just an unfortunate personality trait in certain believers. It misrepresents God. It tells a watching world that knowing Him is a burden to be borne rather than a gift to be received. It reduces the gospel to a transaction: your sin for His forgiveness, your obedience for His approval. Clean, efficient, and almost entirely beside the point.

John Piper put it this way: “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.” You may find that framing helpful or you may want to push back on it, but the Westminster divines were there first. They wrote it into the very first question of the catechism, as if to say: get this wrong and everything else will be slightly off.

And they had good reason. The Psalms alone are saturated with the language of delight — taste and see that the Lord is good, take delight in the Lord, in His presence is fullness of joy. And doesn’t the Garden of Eden seem like it was made for it? The catechism didn’t invent this idea. It borrowed it from Scripture.

The question is worth sitting with personally. Do you enjoy God? Not do you believe in Him or love Him or serve Him faithfully, though all of those matter. But do you enjoy Him? Is there something in your relationship with God that functions like delight? If the answer is yes, that is worth naming and nurturing. If the answer is not yet, that is not a reason for shame. It is an invitation.

On days when joy in the Lord is a little harder to find, crowded out by the things of this world, try turning your eyes upon Jesus and starting there — with who He is and what He has done for you.

We were made for this. Not just to serve God, but to enjoy Him. Forever.

And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” — Genesis 3:8-9

There’s something worth pausing on before we even get to the hiding. Before the shame or the question or any of it, there is a sound. The sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. The Hebrew word used here, mithallek, carries the sense of moving back and forth, a kind of unhurried walking about that suggests routine. As if this was something God did regularly. As if the man and the woman had heard this sound before, had recognized it, had perhaps even welcomed it.

They knew that sound. And now, for the first time, it frightened them.

That detail alone tells us something enormous about what’s been lost. There was once a time when the presence of God was expected, familiar, the rhythm of their days. God walking in the garden in the cool of the evening was simply what happened. It was home. The Hebrew phrase for the cool of the day carries the sense of wind or breath. It’s that particular hour in the late afternoon when the heat breaks and the air moves again and everything feels briefly like relief. God came in the relief of the day. God came when the world was at its most gentle.

Now that gentleness is the thing they’re hiding from.

What they do next is worth looking at carefully, because we might expect them to run. To bolt for the edge of the garden, to try to put distance between themselves and what’s coming. But they don’t. The man and the woman don’t flee the garden. They hide inside it. They press themselves among the very trees that God spoke into existence, in the same garden where everything had been gift and abundance and unearned generosity, and they make themselves as small and invisible as they can.

This isn’t escape. You can’t escape the garden God made by hiding in the garden God made. But that’s not really what hiding is about, is it? Hiding isn’t about getting away. It’s about not being seen.

And they’d never needed to think about that before. Being seen wasn’t a problem to be managed. They were naked and unashamed, the text told us just a few verses earlier, which is another way of saying they were fully known and completely unafraid of it. There was nothing to hide and no instinct to hide it. That was the world before. Nakedness and unashamed are two words that seem almost impossible to hold together now, but they once described the ordinary condition of human life before God.

Now they’re pressing their backs against tree trunks and pulling branches around themselves and hoping that somehow the God who made their eyes can’t see them with his.

Notice also that they’re hiding together and hiding alone at the same time. The text says both the man and his wife hid themselves, yet when God calls out, he calls to the man individually. Where are you? Not where are you both. The hiding that sin produces is collective and isolating simultaneously. They’re in the same place doing the same thing, and they’ve never been more alone. That’s another thing sin does that we rarely name. It doesn’t just separate us from God. It puts a kind of glass wall between us and each other, so that we’re together but unreachable, present but not truly known, side by side among the trees.

The fig leaves are worth noting too, though they appear just before our passage. The first thing fallen human beings do, before God says a word or there’s any confrontation, is reach for a covering. They try to solve the problem themselves. They try to manage the exposure. The instinct to hide and the instinct to self-cover arrive together, immediately, as naturally as breathing. No one taught them to do this. It simply rose up from somewhere newly broken inside them.

That’s what sin does to us. It doesn’t just make us do wrong things. It makes us afraid of being known.

And then God speaks. And the first word God speaks to fallen humanity isn’t a verdict or a sentence or even an accusation.

It’s a question.

Where are you?

This is the moment we need to sit with longest, because it’s the strangest thing in the passage. God isn’t surprised. The omniscient creator of the universe hasn’t been caught off guard by what happened in the garden that afternoon. He isn’t asking because he’s lost track of two people among the trees. He knows exactly where they are. He knows what they did. He knows what it cost them and what it will cost them still.

So why ask?

Because the question isn’t a request for information. It’s an invitation to come out.

Where are you? is the sound of a door being opened from the outside. It’s God refusing to let the hiding be the end of the story. He could have passed by in silence. He could have let them stay crouched among the trees until they worked up the courage to emerge on their own. He could have issued a summons, formal and cold. Instead he asks a question that requires a response, that pulls the man toward speech, toward honesty, toward the terrifying and necessary act of being found.

The first word God speaks to sinners is an open door.

We are, most of us, very good at hiding. We’ve refined it far beyond fig leaves and garden trees. The modern versions are more sophisticated and far more socially acceptable, which is part of what makes them so effective.

We hide in our schedules, filling every hour so there’s no quiet in which anything uncomfortable might surface. A full calendar is one of the most respectable hiding places available to us, because no one questions a busy person, no one expects a busy person to slow down and feel something. We hide in our competence, making ourselves so useful and so capable that no one thinks to look underneath the performance at the person who’s frightened and uncertain and in over their head. We hide in our humor, deflecting with a well-timed joke the moment a conversation gets close to something real. We hide in our theology, sometimes, using the right words and the correct doctrines as a kind of protective layer, so that we seem engaged with God without actually having to be vulnerable before him.

And some of us have been hiding so long that we’ve forgotten what we’re hiding from. The instinct has simply become a way of life. We’re just people who don’t let others get too close, who keep the conversation light, who are fine — always fine, relentlessly fine — and who’ve learned not to ask themselves too many questions in the quiet moments because of what the quiet might say back.

Underneath all of it is something that functions exactly like what the man and woman felt crouching in that garden. It’s the bone-deep fear that if we’re fully seen, fully known, what will be seen and known won’t be acceptable. That the real self, the one beneath the fig leaves, beneath the competence and the humor and the busy schedule, is too broken or too small or too ashamed to be looked at directly.

The hiding always costs us more than we expect. We stay lonely inside our carefully managed lives, known only at the surface, and wonder why something always feels slightly hollow, why even a good day can end with a vague sense that we haven’t quite been present for it.

The God who walked in the garden that evening asking Where are you? is the same God who, centuries later, walked into human history in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. And what strikes me about that is the incarnation is the same question made flesh. It’s God refusing, again, to let the hiding be the end of the story.

He didn’t send a summons. He came himself. He walked among us unhurried, recognizable, calling people by name out of their particular hiding places. Zacchaeus up in his tree, invisible by design, seen immediately. The woman at the well in the middle of the day, when no one else would be there, hiding in plain sight. Peter on the beach after the denial, after the worst night of his life, met not with a verdict but with breakfast and a question. Where are you? is always underneath the specific words, always the same open door.

And on the cross something more happens still. Jesus goes into the darkest hiding place of all as He absorbs the full weight of everything we’ve ever done, everything we’ve ever been ashamed of, every broken and frightened thing we’ve tried to cover. He takes the verdict that our hiding deserved, so that the voice calling Where are you? no longer has to be the voice we dread.

The question doesn’t change. But everything about what it costs us to answer it does.

You’re hiding something. I don’t know what it is, and you may not need to say it to anyone but God, but the thing you keep covered is there. It’s that part of yourself you manage carefully, the fear that lives just underneath your composure.

The voice asking Where are you? isn’t the voice of a prosecutor building a case. It isn’t impatient or disgusted or surprised. It’s the same voice that walked in the garden in the breath of the evening, unhurried, in the cool relief of the day, the sound of someone who simply wants you found.

You don’t have to have it together to come out from hiding. You don’t have to have an explanation prepared or a convincing account of how things got this way. The man in the garden probably came out stammering and defensive, blaming his wife, barely coherent. And God stayed. God kept talking. God didn’t leave.

Come out from among the trees. You’ve been known all along. The question is just whether you’ll let yourself be found.

Lord, you know where I am. You’ve always known. Give me the courage today to stop hiding from you, from others, from myself. Let the sound of your coming be the thing that draws me out rather than the thing that drives me deeper in. Amen.

Welcome to One Passage at a Time, a biweekly devotional with occasional Margin Notes in between. My prayer is that these reflections strengthen your faith and help you grow closer to Christ. Thank you for reading. See you next time.

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