Shame is the most powerful master emotion. It’s the fear that we’re not good enough. –Brené Brown

I am going to offend many Christians with this next statement, and for that, I apologize. I do not believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis 1-3. Out of the over 17 genres of literature found in the Bible, I don’t think any of them are meant to explain cosmology. While I totally believe in a God who created the universe, I don’t need to believe that he spent only six literal 24-hour periods forming all the intricacies of what we now know as quantum physics, chemistry, biology, and every other science to believe he exists. I don’t need to believe that the Bible, which I do believe is inspired, is inerrant, in order for me to fully trust in the macro truths it reveals.

This in no way diminishes the importance of Genesis and why the author wrote it in the first place, which I believe was to educate us about our place in relation to God. And part of that place involves seeing how our desire to know everything and be everything actually leads to a realization of our own shortcomings. The truth is, we are often unaware of our own frailty and when there is a dissonance between who we want to be and who are really are, it can lead to shame just like it did for the (possibly figurative) characters of Adam and Eve in the garden once they realized they were naked.

The narrative says that they used to walk with God in the garden. They were homies. They probably had God over for dinner parties, and maybe played a prehistoric version of Cards Against Humanity. The point is they were fully connected in a way that made them feel known and loved. Then the whole serpent-apple incident happened, and all of a sudden they were exposed both emotionally and physically.

For the first time, mankind was introduced to shame, forever changing the way humans relate to our creator. Brené Brown describes shame as this: “…the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging – something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.”

Adam and Eve must have felt a deep sense of unworthiness. The story says they made excuses for why they disobeyed God’s one warning and then hid from him. (On a side note, I’m pretty sure playing hide and seek with the creator of the universe is a losing endeavor.) They thought their choice – this action of eating a forbidden fruit – defined their relationship with him. They probably believed God no longer wanted to have anything to do with them.

We’re just the same, aren’t we? We don’t believe God cares or wants to be involved in our lives because we think we are constantly failing to live up to the ideals we imagine he has set for us. Or maybe we feel he’s abandoned us for those same reasons. Whether it’s divorce or some other type of failure, abuse or body issues, or one of the myriad of things we experience throughout our lives, shame tells us we’re not deserving of devotion and loyalty from the King of Kings. It kills our instincts and fools our intuition into believing the lie that we are defined by the mistakes of our present and of our past. So we decide to go our own way, living and drowning in the endless well of our self-diagnosed inadequacies.

But what I’ve learned is this: there is nothing we can do to change our relationship with God. He saw us (humans) as very good from our inception and still sees each of us as his own image bearers. He counts us as worthy. So much so that he calls us sons and daughters and co-heirs. He loves us with a force we will never fully comprehend.

Like the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son, God is always ready to meet us when we decide to return to him. Not only meet us, run to us. Welcome us back with open arms and no rehashing of our missteps along the way. Oh, and then he’ll throw us a party. And luckily for us, it’s impossible to experience both shame and royalty at the same time.

[Photo: Lake Tekapo, New Zealand, August 2017]