Waymaker by Ann Voskamp

 

Waymaker by Ann Voskamp

An extract from Chapter 1 In the Beginning

Genesis 3 verse 9 “Where are you?” Taken from Waymaker by Ann Voskamp

It’s God’s first recorded question in all of history, the shortest question of the entire Hebrew Bible and it hasn’t stopped echoing across the topography of time. Only 3 words. The most life-changing questions always are the shortest. In Hebrew it’s actually only one word: ayekah. That one word God is speaking into this moment, even right now. Where are you going with your life? Where is your soul on the way? Where you are – is this truly where you want to be?

When an all-knowing God asks a question – Where are you – isn’t he only asking so you will begin to know the answer? The God who knows how to choreograph the sun and moon and stars across the skies, who moves these waves, who knows where Adam hid, who knows where the head’s at, where the soul aches, where the heart’s fractured. God isn’t asking for Adam’s or anyone’s coordinates – he’s asking me to seek out and coordinate my own heart with his. The disappointments and disillusions, the dreams and desperate hopes, these are already known to an all-knowing God. He asks you where you are in your life because he wants you to name the place, see the place, acknowledge it, sit with it – even befriend it.

Ayekah means God understands everything going on inside and doesn’t want a soul to hide. Not to hide from the feelings, not to hide from the hoping, not to hide from the dreaming, not to hide from the grieving. Like Adam and Eve, the temptation is to flee. To cover who I am and how this feels because I’d rather wander lost than sit with the fear of fully feeling, the fear of being transparent and known, only to experience the flooding shame of rejection and abandonment.

But here’s what no-one tells you: When you hide who you are, what you ultimately are hiding from is yourself. This is a haunting, exhausting kind of lost. And if evil can keep you distracted from taking the time to ask your soul where you really are, he can take you every day further from the life you envisioned.

When we find the courage to be transparent, we find ourselves found. Only when you ask where you are every day can you find your way. The God who asks where you are. He’s large enough to hold you – however, wherever you are.

Where in the world am I really?

Search me O God and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me and lead in the way everlasting! Psalm 139 verses 23 and 24

Do I want to say where I am to I AM? “God speaks to Adam and halts him in his flight. Come out of your hiding place – out of your self-torment … Confess who you are, do not lose yourself in religious despair, be yourself. Adam where are you?” beckoned theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

This is the age of Adam’s – we evade the arms of God. Stay alone and you stay lost.

But when aloneness ends, lostness ends and we have a God who names himself the One who is with us.

It’s striking that he used the word ayekah when he could have used the more common, generic word for “where” in Hebrew, eifoh, which simply means to locate. Eifoh is the word Saul used when seeking David, when Naomi asked about Ruth’s whereabouts, when Joseph was trying to track down his brothers. Ayekah on the other hand, expresses a heart motivation beyond mere location, and ayekah conveys expectations: “Where have you gone? Where are you if you are not here with me?”

When Adam and Eve turned away from intimacy with God, God cried ayekah because he was asking more than simply, “Where are you?” He was asking, “Where are you in relation to Me? Where have you gone that’s taken you further away from Me? Where are you when the expectation is that you and I would always be together?”

God cries because there is distance between him and his lover and God’s first known question of history asks you to orient to the topography of intimacy, to locate yourself in the Landscape of Love.

God knows what it’s like for there to be trouble in paradise, for paradise to go all wrong, for the perfect way to fall away, for there to be distance. For all the times nothing is turning out the way I’ve dreamed and I’ve howled at God, “Where are you?” He’s howled his own very first question of all time with that one word, ayekah, that howls

Where are you when it was once all about you and me – and now it’s all about you and that damned lying snake? Woe is Me; where have you gone? I just want you here with Me.

For the Lord your God is looking for you, means to be “always with you./He celebrates and sings because of you” (Zephaniah 3 verse 17)

The triune God isn’t disappointed in you, isn’t rebuking you, isn’t rejecting you, but the triune God delights in you, smiles over you, seeks to be with you, revives you with his kiss of grace and can’t stop singing love songs because of you. God knows that it always takes three to make the realest love out of anything, never only two. In the space between 2 people, only God can make a love that transcends the disappointments. The way that God wants the most is the way that keeps us close to Him. Right from the beginning, God has ached over any space and distance between us. When we were looking for a way out, God’s woe over any distance between us drove him to make a way to us. To be with us.

The cross points to the Way with open arms. Because our fall was detachment from God our restoration is found only in attachment to God. If our first sin was to turn from God, detach the fruit from the tree, and savour it, then our return to wholeness is to turn, attach to God and savour him. Though our fall broke our attachment to God, he makes a way to us, slips his arms around us and whispers all will be well now because he is Immanuel, God with us. Our story can know restoration if our attachment to God is restored. The very symbol of the faith, the intersection of the cross, expresses how God purposes us for connection. God has always been a WayMaker, making more than merely a way through. The WayMaker is making a way to you.

What if the only thing that will heal our hearts is to let him fuse his broken heart with ours?