Lavender & Lace

When God sees our sin he sees our pain.

“When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”

He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”

Genesis 3:6-10

In the very beginning of the Bible we have a story about people screwing things up. I find this incredibly comforting as someone who has massively screwed up on more than one occasion in my life. And will probably continue to do so for the rest of my life.

Upon reading this story, how many of us can relate to doing the thing that we said we would never do? And that feeling, that overwhelming shame and desire to run and hide?

And here comes God, the creator of the universe, walking through the garden in the cool of the day, calling out to them; Where are you?

Do you think God knows what they did?

Do you think God knew where they were?

So why does he ask?

Ladies and gentlemen, at the very beginning of the Bible we get a picture of what it looks for you and I to be human and a picture of God as a God who comes after us. A God who pursues.

While Adam and Eve are so overwhelmed by their mistake, overcome by shame, the first thing they do is hide from God.

This is such a human attribute isn’t it? How many of you can think back to childhood and can recall a time in which you had done someone “bad” and then tried to hide it? Like somehow, if no one sees it then it didn’t happen, right?

And as adults we still sew fig leaves together. Some of us have been sewing fig leaves together for a long time and have whole closets full of them. Thinking that we have somehow mastered our ability to hide our sin and our shame.

The deepest desire of the human heart is to be seen and to be known, but it is also our deepest fear.

Because how many of us, underneath all that hurt, all that confusion, and blaming and shame, underneath all that heaviness that we carry around day to day, underneath it all, just want to be loved?

What does it mean to receive?

To receive means to get, acquire, or accept something given, offered, or sent, such as a letter or a gift. It also means to experience or undergo something, like receiving a blow or experiencing good news.

To receive something takes a huge amount of vulnerability because it requires admitting a need. 

The need to be known is the need for intimacy. Intimacy means being fully at home with someone. Home is not a place it is where I am fully known and loved and received just as I am. It is where I am free to be completely myself without putting on acts to win another’s approval. Only in the presence of my family and true friends am I at home. And only trusted love can give such intimacy. 

Who do you feel most at home with? 

The desire for us to be home, the desire for us to receive, the desire for us to find intimate love, that’s the deepest ache of our heart because that is where we belong. 

God is calling us into communion to receive his heart so that our hearts are made known. 

I don’t find myself looking anywhere else but to Christ. He’s the one who knows me, he’s the one who reveals me to myself. Ultimately it’s his heart that is my home. And all the beautiful things in this life are simply reflections of the deepest parts of his heart to draw us to him, where all is made known. Where his desire is to heal all that is lost. 

Only trusted love can give such intimacy. 

So what does it mean to trust? 

Trust involves a confident reliance on the integrity, ability, and intentions of another person or thing, which allows for vulnerability and the acceptance of the unknown, rather than requiring absolute proof. It is a cornerstone of social relationships, built through consistent honesty and reliability, enabling actions, decisions, and shared efforts to proceed despite inherent uncertainty. 

Trust is a form of hope.

For those who have been following my journey for a while, you know that God has been calling me into a season of deconstruction and healing. He has taken to the task of completely restructuring my entire foundation. The entire thing. And if you’ve ever watched Fixer Upper, you know that if you ever want to fix the foundation work of a house it is usually a last resort thing. Or it’s the thing you have to do first before you do anything else. Because it’s very time consuming. It’s very hard work and tends to be very costly. 

And over the course of the last couple months I just remember being tremendously unhappy and not knowing why. And when I realized that there were these parts of my heart where I wasn’t receiving God because I had all these active areas of my life or fear, trauma, challenges, and stress…and I didn’t know what to do about it. So I began a long task of opening myself up to the pain, to the uncomfortablity, and to the work of the Spirit within me. And it’s only been just recently that God has taken the healing to a whole new level. 

He spoke to me and said,

Because I love you very much I’m going to take you down to the very foundation of your soul. It’s not going to be easy, but you’re my beloved and I want to see you whole. And out of my tenderness and care for you we’re going to go very, very, deep.

And that is exactly what has happened. 

Have you ever had this feeling of being stripped of all the things that you used to rely on to self-protect? God called me out of hiding, took away my fig leaves, and all the ways I try to perform or prove myself. Totally stripped bare, I found myself standing in front of the Lord able to truly say;

You’re the only thing I have. 

Because, truthfully, there are parts of me where I feel completely abandoned. These big, ugly, gaping holes of nothingness that have existed with me since before I breathed air. And for as long as I’ve know they existed, nothing could ever come close to touching them. I built up these huge walls and made these inner vows to myself to make sure those places where I am most vulnerable are never ever touched again because they are places of death. But I’ve had these deep encounters lately and one of the things that God did was show me something that actually profoundly changed my life. 

Did you know that when the Romans crucified someone, after they were done being beaten and tortured, they would strip the person naked and crucify them in their most vulnerable state?

Jesus, was stretched out on the cross, bare, vulnerable, and utterly abandoned. He took those deep, dark, aches of my heart and acted them out in real time upon the cross…for me.

And that was the realization that cracked my heart wide open.

He takes our hurt and our deepest traumas and he unties them unto himself. All those things that we couldn’t even bear to utter, he takes them upon himself and they become one with his heart. The beautiful, sacred, heart is broken and pierced, wide open, to take us home. 

To love someone very deeply and to bear their sin…that is a fierce kind of love. 

That is an eternal kind of love. 

That is why there is no other human being who can satisfy our ache to be loved apart from Him. 

When we allow Jesus to come and to love us more deeply, we drop our facades and all of our defense mechanisms, we allow ourselves to become naked in the garden, to see and to be seen…we become the person God already knows us to be. 

There is nothing that you have suffered or will suffer that Jesus does not understand. And it’s that kind of love that is intensely personal. And it’s intensely glorious. And it is intensely transformative. 

My friend, if you are reading this and you feel like there is no way you could ever be that open and honest about where you’ve been and the deep dark places of your soul that you keep hidden I would just like you to know this: It’s already been done. The price has already been paid, there’s nothing you could ever do to earn it. It’s already yours. It’s finished.

The gentleness of Jesus is softer than any comforting word I could offer you. But if I were to attempt to say anything, it would simply be that God loved you so much that he stepped down to earth and took upon himself the justice that we deserve, in order to secure a home with Him forever.

All you have to do is reach out and take it.