What God Lost in the Garden

I’m on a business trip with my husband this week. It’s a luxury for me to unwind and focus on my writing without the daily necessities of planning dinner, chores, etc. I’m able to just sit and write, or ramble around the town and find inspiration for characters.
This morning I had one of those moments where it seems time freezes. I was standing in the lobby of the hotel, having just come from breakfast. To my left a group leader prowled around her group of listeners. They stood in a semi-circle and some yawned, some jerked their heads up as she entered their field of vision. It was early and I imagine not all the coffees had kicked in yet. She was extolling the virtues of whatever enterprise they were gathered there to discuss.
To my right, harried hotel clerks scrambled to help guests check out.
A drink dispenser repairman grumbled under his breath as he crawled on the floor, tools clanking on this and that part on the dusty machine he’d edged away from the wall.
I stood in silence in the middle of this moving, breathing microcosm of humanity.
And the thought hit me, how we must look to God, scrambling around, scratching for subsistence. Plunging ahead blindly in our own enterprises, with barely a thought of Him.
That was when it came to me in a flash, what God lost in the Garden of Eden.
I’d always focused on man’s estrangement from God. But this morning I realized the pain God must have felt at being stripped of the pleasure of walking and talking intimately with His creation.
“They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.Then the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?” Genesis 3:8-9
The Father, the Creator, calling to His child, “Where are you?”
He wants to commune with us, and it breaks His heart when we are not to be found.
Kathy Sprinkle posted Tuesday evening C.S. Lewis’ quote which summed it up:
“We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are too easily pleased.”