Where Are You?

Two people were standing in a garden with leaves sewn around them, listening to someone walking.

They had made the coverings themselves, not long before, with whatever they could find. They sewed together fig leaves and made coverings for themselves. It's the first thing in the Bible that a person makes, and it was made to hide in.

Then the sound came. Then the man and his wife heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the breeze of the day, and they hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.

Walking, in the breeze of the day, through a garden he had planted. And two people standing very still behind the trees, hoping not to be found.

He didn't come crashing through the brush. He called out.

---

The first question in the Bible isn't God's. It belongs to the serpent, a few lines earlier, and it's about what God said. Did God really say...? The conversation went downhill from there.

The first question God asks is a different kind of question.

Where are you?

That's all of it. Three words, called across a garden at the end of the day. Not what have you done. Not why did you do it. Those come later, and they're asked. But the opening question is about location, and the one asking it already knows the answer. He made the garden. He knows which trees are wide enough to stand behind.

So it wasn't a request for information. It was a door left open. It gave the man a chance to say, in his own words, where he was.

And he did, more honestly than you might expect. I heard Your voice in the garden, he replied, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself. Heard, afraid, hid. Three true things in one sentence. It's not a speech anybody would rehearse. It's just where he was.

It didn't last. The next question got a different kind of answer. The woman whom You gave me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate it. The honest sentence came first, and the blame came after, the way it often does with people in trouble. The record keeps both.

But the first answer stands. When he was asked where he was, he said so.

It's worth noticing what the question doesn't do. It doesn't accuse, and it doesn't assume the man has his bearings. People who have just stepped out from behind something, a job, a long marriage, years of caring for a parent, can often say exactly where they were and not at all where they are. The question makes room for the plain answer. Behind a tree. Afraid. That was enough to start with.

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That's how this book works. It's built on questions.

When people in Scripture came to the end of something, they very rarely got an explanation. They got asked something. A servant on the run by a spring in the desert. A prophet in a cave after the biggest day of his career. A man who'd been lying by a pool for thirty-eight years. A fisherman on a beach, early in the morning, asked the same thing three times in a row.

Not all of them come from God. One is asked by a widow, about herself, at the edge of the town she'd come home to. One is asked by a king, of the servant who poured his wine. They're here because they're the right questions, and because the people who heard them were standing about where a lot of us are standing now.

The title comes from one of them.

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There was a man keeping sheep on the far side of a desert. The flock wasn't his. It belonged to his father-in-law. Meanwhile, Moses was shepherding the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian. He'd been raised in a palace, as the adopted son of a king's daughter. That life ended badly, and he'd been in the wilderness with somebody else's animals ever since.

He was eighty when he finally stood in front of Pharaoh. The record gives the number plainly. Moses was eighty years old and Aaron was eighty-three when they spoke to Pharaoh.

When God called him out of the desert, Moses had objections, and he had them in order. Who am I. What do I call you. What if they don't believe me. I've never been any good with words. Send someone else. Each one was reasonable, and each one was about what he didn't have.

In the middle of that list, God asked him something.

What is that in your hand?

A staff, he said.

A shepherd's stick. The plainest thing he owned. He'd been holding it the whole conversation, and it hadn't occurred to him that it counted for anything.

That chapter is further on, and it gets its own telling. For now it's enough to say what the whole book says, once, and then leave it alone.

The role is gone. What was in your hand never was the role.

---

This book is for anyone who has just walked out the door of one.

The career closed, or the business sold, or it went to the next generation and they're running it their own way. The title is somebody else's now. The last child moved out, and the house is very quiet. The caregiving ended, the way caregiving ends. Somewhere around sixty, give or take, the thing that answered the question of who you were for thirty years stopped answering it.

Some people come out of that relieved, and it lasts. Some crash a week after the send-off. Some are still angry about how it ended. Some just wake up on a Tuesday and can't say where they are.

This isn't a book about money, except for one chapter, and that chapter says plainly that it isn't financial advice. It isn't a plan to fill the calendar, either. Nobody in here is going to hand you a new title, a board seat or a list of places that need volunteers. Those can be good things. They aren't the answer to the question, and the people in these pages didn't get them as answers.

It doesn't assume you believe any of it. Some people walked out of their faith in the same season they walked out of the job, and they had their reasons. The questions work either way. Nobody's grading them.

---

I turn sixty the month this book was written. I spent twenty-five years on church staffs, left in 2006, and have spent the years since running family businesses. I've watched a lot of people walk out the door of a role, and I've done it myself. I'm not writing from the far side of it. That's the last you'll hear about me.

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Each chapter takes one question and starts in the scene where it was asked. It tells what happened to the person plainly, including the parts that come after the tidy ending. Then the question gets set apart on its own line, and the chapter says one true thing about it, once.

After that comes a short section called Where this meets your week. It's a few ordinary situations from the second half of life where that old scene and an ordinary week line up, each with one plain thing to do.

Then one small move. Most often it's the smallest thing the person in the story actually did. A sentence spoken out loud. A meal. Staying put. None of them needs a building, a title or anybody's permission, and every one can be done tonight, alone.

Twelve more questions follow this one, and the last chapter turns the asking around.

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A few plain suggestions for reading it, none of them required.

Take one chapter a week. The chapters are short enough to read in one sitting, but the questions are not meant to be finished in one. Read it early in the week, try the small move in the middle, and let the rest of the week do what it does. Thirteen weeks is about a season. That's long enough for a question to settle.

Keep a notebook. Any cheap one will do, as long as it stays in one place and only holds this. Write the date and the chapter's question at the top of a page, and answer it in whatever words come. Most chapters ask for a sentence or two on paper. Over a season those pages turn into a record of where you actually were, week by week, which is a hard thing to remember later.

Read it alone, or read it with someone. A spouse who is going through the same change from the other side of the kitchen table. One old friend. Three or four people who walked out of their roles in the same year. If you read it together, meet once a week for an hour, read the question out loud, and let each person answer it without being corrected. The rule that makes it work is simple: nobody fixes anybody. Several chapters suggest a way to do this with someone else.

And skip whatever doesn't fit. Some of these questions will land on the week you're having, and some won't. Come back to those later, or never.

Every quotation comes from the Berean Standard Bible, a modern translation anyone is free to use, and each has been checked against it word for word. Where a chapter leans on a guess instead of the text, it says so. Keep a Bible open if you have one, and check any of it.

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Write down where you actually are this morning.

Not where you meant to be by now. Not where people think you are. A sentence or two, as plain as his: heard, afraid, hid. Something like that, in your own words. The room you're sitting in counts. So does the thing you've been avoiding saying.

Do it tomorrow morning, before the day fills up, somewhere you can sit for ten minutes without being asked for anything. Use the first page of the notebook if you've got one. Write the date. Then write a sentence that starts with "This morning I am..." and finish it as honestly as you can. Where you're sitting. What woke you up. What you've been avoiding. One person might write, "This morning I am at the kitchen table at six, because I still wake up for a job I don't have." Another might write, "This morning I am angry, and I don't know at whom." Both are answers.

If nothing comes, write "I don't know where I am," and stop. That's a location too. If what comes is heavier than you expected, put the pen down and close the notebook. The question will still be there next week.

Nobody needs to read it. The point is the same as it was in the garden. The question was already asked, and the one asking already knew. What was missing was the answer, said out loud by the person standing behind the tree.

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There's one more thing he did in that garden before anybody left it, and it's easy to miss among the consequences.

And the LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife, and He clothed them.

They had covered themselves with leaves. He made them something better, and put it on them himself.