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08.3 What’s the Bible All About… naked

Posted on by Chadwick and Amy

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God then asks a simple question of them: Who told you that you were naked.

There is no verbal response or answer given. I imagine, that the only thing that took place was that awkward and blank stare that parents receive from their children upon asking them who left all the lights on in the house.

Their was no answer needed, because in Adam’s heart, he was already experiencing the answer to the question. You see… it was Adam who told Adam that he was naked.

The shame that Adam was experiencing for partaking in more than what was needed created a gap in how Adam saw himself.

Shame had caused a separation to be experienced within his being… one that caused him to hide behind the covering of clothing and the foliage of the garden. This was the first time that Adam and Eve felt that they were not enough, and something more was needed than what they had already been given.

The situation spirals as Adams response to having to confront his own shame leads to deflection and justification of his actions as he basically says that it was God who had decided that all he had was not good until ‘she’ came along. It was God’s fault for disrupting Adams bachelor life in the garden with all the plants and animals. It was God’s who had decided to create Eve…

And it was in that moment, with finger pointed to Eve, that I can see Adam turning his head towards her and catching her eye for the first time since letting his shame take control of his tongue, that he saw that she too now felt his shame against her…

Before these few critical moments in the human story, all that was understood was a deep, close intimacy with nothing between man and woman. This reality which none of us have experienced in this life, gave way to a new ‘knowing’… if you will… as they now understood something that we know all to well… separation.

It is being in the same bed with someone, and feeling as if you are universes apart.

It is words articulated clearly that fall on deaf ears.

It is giving the best of what you have, only to discover that it doesn’t seem to be what they need.

Separation… birthed from our response to the shame of not being content with who we are and what we have that is what we must deal with every day as we seek to get back to a lost innocence, and a life that we know could be much simpler than all that we have created it to be.

 

08.1 What’s the Bible All About… Alone

Posted on by Chadwick and Amy

garden-of-eden-amazing-fresh-green-lanscape-nature-waterfall-wildOne of my favorite stories in the Bible is that of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. There is more wrapped into these couple of chapters at the beginning of Genesis that lay out the true condition of the human heart in its purest sense than anything that I’ve ever encountered. I don’t know what your experience with this story is… whether you’ve been taught that it is a literal historical even… or a metaphorical image of early humanity. I simply want to unpack some of the lessons that I have gleaned from it over the years, and let the chips fall where they may. This isn’t a careful exegete of the text, simply an unfolding of the events that led us from a place of innocence to the often times messy existence we find ourselves in on a daily basis in our relationship with the world around us.

Somewhere deep within the fabric of who we are as people, is a sense that we were created for intimacy… for unguarded connection. We try connect this desire with the people, places and things that we interact with on a daily basis, often times with mixed results.

Before I go any further into this conversation, it is important that I pause first and define a couple things regarding intimacy since I believe it is one of those words that has been saturated with various meanings in our culture.

When I speak of ‘intimacy’, I am referring to the idea that all of us desire to ‘know’ and ‘be known’ in a pure and unguarded way. In the Hebrew language, the word ‘yada’ means, ‘to know’. It is the root word to over 600 other experiential words in Hebrew that cover the whole landscape of our emotions, thoughts, and activities.

Anything or anyone that we say, ‘we know’ can be described in some form of ‘yada’. I know… football. I know… pizza. I know how to bake bread… or build a work bench. There are some areas of life that we know very well… and others… not so much.

To say that you ‘know’ something or someone is basically saying… ‘I got this.’ Now, that may be true. Some people think they know something, when really they are just into the idea of it. Someone may say that they know you… when in reality… they don’t.

To be truly intimate with someone means that we can say, that we know them… and they know us… unguarded… for who we are. You would think that with over 7 billion people on the planet, our odds would be pretty good that we’d be able to land in a relationship with at least one of them that we can say that intimacy flourishes. For many, if not most of us, however… this is not the case. Truth is… we struggle. Intimacy doesn’t seem to come naturally. We are not able to open ourselves completely to another, and find ourselves frustrated when the person or people we are with seem to be very distant from us.

If we are hardwired for this kind of intimacy, why is it so difficult?

I believe the story of Adam and Eve contains some of the gems we need to uncover to understand the reason intimacy often seems, at best, just beyond our reach.

In the beginning… it was all good.

Except for one thing… Adam was alone.

(photo courtesy of http://storytechsystems.com/)