God became a seamstress

I've been working my way through Chuck DeGroat's book Healing What's Within: Coming Home to Yourself - and to God - When You're Wounded, Weary, and Wandering.  

I was in chapter 3, The Body Tells A Story, and pages 71-72 jumped out at me and struck a chord inside. I'm not sure I can even paraphrase it, so... here it is:

And that's what that first, ancient story in Scripture reveals too. When God approached Adam and Eve with a compassionate "Where are you?" they were already disconnected, mired in anxiety, hidden amidst their own storming hyperarousal within. Searing shame severed them from themselves, even their own bodies. Their quickly-sewn-together fig-leaved garments were a survival strategy for life outside of Eden. But they were not well. Indeed, they were far from Home. Maybe you know the feeling.

Genesis 3 is often told as a story of cosmic tragedy, a proof text for all that went wrong. And, indeed, you need only read the chapters to come to realize the calamity of self-sufficiency, of a life lived in chronic disconnection. But even amidst this, don't miss the stunning reality that God pursues, God attunes, and God blesses, even tending to the bodies of Adam and Even, highlight by this compassionate act: "The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them" (Genesis 3:21).

Cole Arthur Riley in This Here Flesh highlights this stunning and sometimes overlooked moment:

On the day the world began to die, God became a seamstress. This is the moment in the Bible that I wish we talked about more often. When Eve and Adam eat from the tree, and decay and despair begin to creep in, when they learn to hide from their own bodies, when they learn to hide from each other - no one ever told me the story of a God who kneels and makes clothes out of animal skin for them.

I remember many conversations about the doom and consequence imparted by God after humans ate from that tree. I learned of the curses, too, and could maybe even recite them. But no one ever told me of the tenderness of this moment...

When shame had replaced Eve's and Adam's dignity, God became a seamstress. He took the skin off of his creation to make something that would allow humans to stand in the presence of their maker and one another again.

Even in that ancient story, God compassionately attended to Adam and Eve, to anxious hearts and shame-riddled bodies. God does the same for you.

 

Wow. I had never thought of it that way either. And now I hope to never forget it...