The Garden

She wasn’t an angel, because she was a lawyer, and my client, and I’d heard her say the word ‘fuck’ before. But I’m sure one was with her that night. The circumstances of that evening were just too ridiculous. It was fall. Late October. I often stayed late in my office, paralyzed and pinned down by the sheer weight of my life. I’d sit at my desk with a paperclip or staple or some other small pliable object and wonder which thing, if I had done it differently, would have resulted in a better outcome. I had calls to return and bills to pay and…. where were you?

Matt came to my office first that night. He had just returned from Afghanistan to find out that his new wife had found her soulmate in some Officer she met at Oktoberfest. He cried a lot. He had driven by my office and seen the light on. He had a bag full of Sonic Burgers but no appetite and no answers. I didn’t have any answers for him either. Instead, I tried to make him laugh with tales of just how dumb I am, look what I got myself into. Where were you?

I got a text from the lawyer who wasn't an angel. She was coming to town to go to church, and she’d been trying to get a check to me for days. Her insurance was far past due, but I owed her money, too. It costs $180 of a lawyer’s time to fire someone while a locksmith changes the locks. And, she had her own mountain of problems. So I told her I was there, come on by. Join the pity party for a minute or two. Where were you?

I told Matt I used to have a bottle of tequila that a client gave me in the back. Real tequila. Homemade in a dusty backyard in Mexico. It smelled like fire and tasted like revolution. I thought it might kill me if I drank it, so I gave it to someone with a more qualified liver. Funny thing, I don’t remember who that was. But if I still had it, I’d give it to him. He smiled at that.

Her headlights beamed through the glass of my front door, and my head began to hurt, knowing she was coming in. It wasn’t that we didn’t get along, but she had one of those personalities that stretched out into a room like the blueberry girl in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It grew and grew until the room had little room for anything else and sometimes I wondered if she would just explode. Most of the time, I loved this about her. But not tonight.

So glad you’re still here, she said. Funny, I thought. I wished I wasn’t “here”. And by here, I meant anywhere.

Me and Matt were too exhausted with our respective emotions to cover them up. She was well aware of my problems, having been my go-to for legal advice, but she didn’t know Matt. He needed a divorce lawyer. She didn’t do that kind of work. I took her check and told her about the detective I’d spoken to earlier that day. I’d found out that justice isn’t really something everyone gets to have, because in small towns, no one really cares about or knows how to investigate financial crimes. Even better than that, they don’t really care about small-time white-collar embezzlers. That detective was really clear about how I was wasting his time. My time, though… it was choking in the wake of things I couldn’t change. Every minute in that office felt like suffocation. Where were you?

She looked at us, and we looked at her, and people who know struggle can identify it because the storm clouds in their eyes match.

I’m going to church, she said. You should both come with me. In fact, I won’t take no for an answer. Get in my car.

She was threatening in a way that was hard to refuse, but me and God weren’t on speaking terms. I almost said no, but the angel that came in with her put its hand over my mouth when I saw Matt’s demeanor change. I had never talked to Matt about God because I wasn’t real sure I could make any guarantees on what God could do for his marriage when I felt like He’d stopped listening to me long ago. Yeah, Matt said. I’d like to go. Where were you?

I knew she went to a full gospel church. I knew it would be loud and odd and I wondered if I would feel anything. I wanted to be moved. I wanted to hear God’s voice. I wanted desperately to stop feeling alone in my world. I stood there and listened to these people praying, hands raised, eyes closed, making some kind of connection to a Higher Power. I imagined that all of them had the crazy high-speed, 5G internet version of God, and my connection was still on dial-up and kept timing out. I looked around this room, a converted old building with low ceilings and industrial carpet, and pews made from office-style chairs lined just so. If it weren’t for the band in front and the young man with a microphone singing a very R&B version of How Great Thou Art, we might have all been at an AA meeting. I thought about how small this town was and how it was odd that I didn’t see anyone I recognized. I never went anywhere that I couldn’t spot a familiar face. We sang for what seemed like forever. I wanted to feel something. Where were you?

The Preacher started to preach, and the surface of my skin changed. My eyes began to water uncontrollably. He spoke as though his message was for me, as if he had been a fly on the wall in my life for the last six months. Or fifteen years. And I felt something. Where were you?

Let’s talk about the Garden of Eden, he said.

I don’t remember his words now, not exactly, but I remember the message.

I guess I had never really thought about it. God made man to work. The Garden, while Adam and Eve were in it, wasn’t magically self-sustaining. The children of God were always tasked to care for it, to reap and to sow, to fill it with children, to live with it and in it and on it and by it. It wasn’t God’s plan for man to just be able to sit back, do nothing, and enjoy paradise. But the work… when man was abiding in God, God was there beside man as he worked. Imagine the conversation! Imagine being able to ask your Creator for a hand with building the barn and trimming the bushes! The work was work, but they weren’t alone in it.

But then they screwed up. Blame it on him. Blame it on her. It doesn’t really matter.

They separated themselves from God, and now, they would know what it meant to toil. The land would be unyielding. The weather would be treacherous and would destroy what man built, over and over again, in an instant. She would face great pain in continuing her work of populating the earth and he- he would now work for his food and for his shelter and for every bit of anything good there would be to have in his life.

The message was that we should examine our lives. If we were working, as opposed to toilin’, we should feel a sense of fulfillment and peace. Peace, he said from the makeshift stage. He said it forcefully and with conviction, as if peace wasn’t an elusive fifth dimension accessible only to monks and nuns and sleeping babies.

Because standing there, I had never felt peace.

Don’t expect not to work, he said. We are called to work, and work hard. But that’s why a calling is a calling. If we are doing what He has called us to, no matter how hard the work is we will feel Him in it and all over it. We will be fulfilled. We will be living abundantly. We will be at peace.

Examine your life, he said. Are you toiling? Are you working the barren ground, planting seeds where nothing can grows matter how much you pray for rain? Are you constructing your life in the same place where tornadoes ripped it from the ground before? Are you chasing after your food like a wild animal? Is it possible that God called you to do something else, somewhere else, but you don’t have the faith to follow that path, so you’re toiling your life away?

And I’m listening.

And I’m thinking.

And I’m crying.

Matt is crying, too. And the pastor walks right up to me and lays his hand on my shoulder and prays for me.

But…

Where were you?