The Garden Where Nobody Was Lonely

Before there were any people, before there were peach trees or bumblebees or you, there was God. And God was not lonely the way you sometimes are. But he had so much love in him that he wanted somebody to give it to.

So the God who had spoken stars and seas and swallows into being did something new. He knelt down in the dirt.

He shaped that dirt the way you might shape something wonderful out of clay. He made hands. He made a face. He made a whole person, lying still on the ground. And then God leaned close, closer than close, and breathed.

He breathed his own breath into that person's nose.

And the man woke up. He blinked. He was alive, all warm and breathing, because the God who made him had been that near.

God planted a garden just for him. Rivers ran through it, bright and cool. Trees stood heavy with fruit, sweet and good. And there was happy work to do: naming the animals as they came padding and fluttering and slithering past. Lion and owl and little gray mouse, the man gave them all their names.

But as the animals came, the man began to notice something. The lion had a lioness. The owl had her mate. Every creature had one that fit, one that belonged with it. And the man stood there alone.

God saw it too. He looked at the man, all by himself in that beautiful garden, and God said the very first thing in all the world that was not good. "It is not good," he said, "for him to be alone."

Even in paradise, with fruit and rivers and every animal he could name, the man's heart had a space in it shaped like someone he had not met yet.

So God gave the man a deep, deep sleep.

While the man slept, God opened his side. And from inside the man, from close beside his own heart, God made someone new. A woman. When the man woke and saw her, his heart leapt. "At last!" he said. "Here is someone who belongs with me, bone of my bones." The lonely space was filled. They were not ashamed, and they were not afraid, and nobody in all the garden was lonely anymore.

There was a secret hidden in that sleeping, and it would take a long, long time to open. Far in the future, another man would fall into a deep sleep. Not in a garden, but on a cross. And his side would be opened too. And out of that opened side, out of his very heart, Jesus would bring a whole family to himself, a Bride he loved more than his own life.

That ache in the first man, the wanting of someone who fits, was an early hint of how much Jesus wanted you. From the very beginning, he was making a people he would never want to live without.

But all of that was far ahead. For now, the garden lay in the gold of evening. The man and the woman walked together under the trees, and God walked with them, and no one under all that sky was hiding, and no one was alone.