Image: God Clothing Adam and Eve, Book of Hours, William de Brailes

“’By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.’ And the Lord made garments of skins for the man and the woman, and clothed them.” Genesis 3:18, 20

Is this you? You get out of bed planning to be good, but your intentions fall apart before lunch. For all your striving, there’s still too much white space between your values and your deeds. Your life is littered with casual compromises. You rail against idols one minute, pledge allegiance to them the next. You skirmish with your demons, secretly relieved when they win. You’re the grass that flowers by day and withers by night, inconstant as the moon and, as an old hymn puts it, “prone to wander.” Whether purposely, haplessly, or a little of both, like Isaiah’s wayward sheep you go astray. You repent sincerely, and it starts all over again.

After they ate the forbidden fruit,  Adam and Eve found out they were naked and felt, for the first time, ashamed. They were probably scared too. They were about to abandon the Garden for a hard world in which nakedness is a big liability. But God, we read, was unable to let them go like that, defenseless and exposed. They were guilty, not unloved. So God makes clothes for them, personally bending to the task, original mercy for original sin.

It was the first mercy. It won’t be the last. God is relentless: the mercy never ends.

Lent is for repentance. One way to repent is to contemplate your condition, feel guilty and ashamed, and resolve with gritted teeth to become a better person by this time next year. (Good luck with that.)

Or you could repent this way: Contemplate the mercy that has always covered your shame and surrender to it, giving up not beer or Nutella or swear words, but yourself and all your striving. Let God be your holiness, your healing, and your hope.