Where Are You?

God comes looking. Come out of the trees.

June 11, 2026

From Bible Portal

The first thing Adam did after he sinned was hide.

Not confess. Not return. Not face what he had done. He heard the sound of God walking in the garden and pressed himself into the trees, as if the one who formed him from dust could somehow not find him among the leaves.

We have been hiding ever since.

Something in human nature, broken at its deepest level, runs away from God when it has most reason to run toward Him. When shame arrives, we disappear. When we have failed, we find reasons to stay away. We miss worship, we avoid prayer, we grow distant and distracted, and we tell ourselves it is busyness or exhaustion or a dozen other things. But underneath, the pattern is as old as Eden: we sinned, so we hid.

And God walked into the garden and asked the question He already knew the answer to: Where are you?

Two Responses to Uncleanness

Mark 5 gives us a woman who should, by every standard of her world, have hidden. She had been bleeding for twelve years, which meant twelve years of ceremonial uncleanness. She was not supposed to be in public. She was not supposed to touch anyone. She certainly was not supposed to press through a crowd and make contact with a rabbi.

Every instinct of shame said: stay away. You are not clean enough. You have no right to be here. Wait until you are better. Wait until you qualify.

She ignored every one of those voices and came anyway.

Two people. Two moments of uncleanness. One hid. One pressed forward. And the difference between them is the difference between a life that stays lost and a life that finds its healing.

Why Hiding Never Works

Isaiah records God asking a question of His people that echoes the question in the garden. He says: I came and no one was there. I called and no one answered. Did you think my arm was too short to save you? Did you think I lacked the power to rescue you?

The answer God gives is searching: it was not His distance that separated them. It was theirs. He did not send them away. They moved away themselves, pulled by sin, then held in place by shame, until the distance felt permanent.

Shame lies. It tells us the distance is God’s doing, that He has turned away, that we have gone too far. But the voice in the garden was not a voice of rejection. It was a voice of pursuit. God was not asking “where are you?” because He had lost track. He was asking because He wanted Adam to answer. To stop hiding. To come out from behind the trees and be found.

That same voice has been calling ever since.

The Courage That Heals

esus said to the woman: your faith has healed you. We might ask: what exactly was her faith? What did she believe that others around her did not?

She believed that coming to Jesus was worth the risk of being seen. She believed that her need was greater than her shame. She believed that the hem of His garment, barely touched, was more powerful than twelve years of isolation. And she acted on that belief by moving toward Him instead of away.

This is the faith that heals. Not a perfect understanding of theology. Not a clean record or a worthy resume. Just the courage to stop hiding and move toward the one who is already moving toward us.

The problem is never that God has moved away. The problem is always that we are still in the trees.

Before We Move On

There is something we have been hiding from. A failure, a habit, a shame so familiar we have almost stopped noticing it is keeping us at a distance. We have told ourselves we will come back to God when we are in better shape, when the thing we are ashamed of is further behind us, when we feel worthy of the encounter.

Adam hid and God came looking. The bleeding woman came forward and Jesus stopped everything to find her. The direction we move matters more than the condition we are in when we move.

God is still walking in the garden. Still asking the question He asked in the beginning. Still waiting for us to come out from behind the trees.

Where are you?

Come out from behind the trees. Come into the light. Come home.

“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?’” 

— Genesis 3:8–9