I Hid in the Hayloft and Nobody Yelled

I broke the window in the tack room and it was not Bucky and I let everybody think it was Bucky for about forty minutes.

Here is what actually happened. I was throwing a ball against the back wall of the tack room, which I am allowed to do, and I threw it high, which I know not to. And the window is old glass and it went in one piece, all of it, in a way that sounded much bigger than it was.

And Bucky was in the yard. He was standing about fifteen feet away eating the end of a rope, and he looked up when it went, and I looked at him and he looked at me, and I understood in about half a second that there was an available version of this.

So I went up into the hayloft.

I did not say anything to anybody. That is the important part and it is the part that took me longest to understand. I did not tell a lie out loud. I went up the ladder and I got behind the bales at the back where you can see the whole loft and nobody can see you, and I sat there and I waited for it to be found.

I heard my dad come into the yard. I heard him stop. I heard him say Bucky's name in a tired way, which is when my stomach went, because I had done that, not the window, I had done that to a goat who was eating a rope.

Then I heard nothing for a long time. And then I heard the ladder.

He came up and he did not come over to the bales. He sat down on the edge of the loft with his boots hanging over into the barn, with his back to where I was, and he said, in an ordinary voice, that the ball was in the tack room and did I want it back.

I did not say anything for a while. And then I came out from behind the bales, because there was nothing else to do and because he was not looking at me, and I think that was on purpose.

The first question in the book

Something has gone wrong in a garden and two people are hiding in it, and what God does next is not what anybody would draw.

And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? (Genesis 3:9)

He asks. That is the first thing said to a human being after the wrong thing happens, and it is a question, and it is a question He does not need the answer to.

So the question is not for information. It is an invitation to come out, and it is phrased in a way that lets somebody answer it without being caught, which is a distinction any child understands from the inside.

You are being called out rather than dragged out, and Genesis 3:9 uses a question instead of an accusation. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as being sought rather than as being cornered.

And the answer that comes back is honest in a way people usually are not: I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.

Notice that the fear came from the voice. Not from a punishment, which had not been mentioned yet. From hearing somebody arrive.

You have not been approached by somebody whose arrival should be feared. The written word records the fear as the man's own reading of the situation rather than as an accurate report of God, and His Spirit is what corrects a reading like that in a person who has been hiding.

What He did before He said anything else about it

There is a verse near the end of that chapter that most people read past because it sits after a long list of consequences.

Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them. (Genesis 3:21)

The consequences in that chapter are real and the passage does not soften them. And in the middle of all of it, God does something with His hands. He makes clothes. For the two people who have just hidden from Him.

The fig leaves they had made themselves were not adequate and everybody in the story knew it. What He gives them is better than what they made and it costs something, and the text does not comment on that at all, it just records it.

You are covered by something made rather than something you assembled in a hurry. Genesis 3:21 puts the making in God's hands in a single quiet sentence, and the Spirit of God is what makes a quiet sentence weigh more than a loud one.

And this is the pattern the whole rest of the book follows. The question first. Then the truth. Then the covering, which He provides.

You have been met in the order God has always used, and the shouting is not in it anywhere. That is what Genesis 3 puts on the page rather than what a frightened person expects, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves it off the page into a loft.