In the Cool of the Day, and He Is Walking

There is a gate three quarters of the way round with a hinge that has been meaning to go for two years, and she lifts it with her knee without thinking about it, and has done for two years.

Three miles. The lane, the field edge, the stile, the top track where you can see the reservoir, and back down past the gate with the hinge. Every day, more or less, for a long time now. Good boots. She is not vague about this: it is a real walk, in real weather, and she is glad of it.

She gets home at about ten past seven. The kettle goes on. And she stands in the kitchen with her coat still on and she could not tell you one single thing about the last hour.

Not one. Not what the sky was doing. Not whether she passed anybody. Not whether the wheat was still standing in the second field or whether they have cut it, and she genuinely does not know, and they cut it days ago.

She has been giving this hour away for a while. It is the hour she thinks in, which sounds fine, except that thinking has quietly become processing, and processing has become a kind of chewing that goes round and round and produces nothing and eats the walk.

Come and stand by the gate with me for a minute. Because there is a picture right at the front of the book of Someone else out walking in the evening, and I think it changes what your hour actually is.

The first picture of God in a garden is of Someone out walking

Third chapter of Genesis. Everything has just gone wrong, and this is the sentence that follows.

And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.Genesis 3:8

Stop before the rest of the chapter, because the rest of the chapter is what everybody reads it for and this half sentence gets walked past.

Walking in the garden in the cool of the day. The phrasing is casual, and that is the striking thing. It is not describing an event. It is describing a habit. Whatever else you make of that chapter, this much is plain in the grammar of it: God was in the habit of being in that garden at that hour, and the two of them knew the sound of it.

Not a summons. Not a visitation. An evening walk, apparently regular enough to be recognized by its sound.

You are walking an hour that Somebody else has always kept, and the earliest picture of Him in a garden has Him out in the evening. That is not a sentimental reading of a hard chapter; Genesis 3:8 supplies the detail of the cool of the day and supplies it as ordinary, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line from the front of the book and lays it along a field edge at ten past six. The hour was never empty. You were only elsewhere in it.

Now the second half, and I want to be careful with it because it is where advice usually goes wrong.

I am not about to hand you a walking technique. There are plenty and some of them are useful and none of them is what this is. If I told you to notice five things and name three sounds, you would do it for eight days and then the chewing would come back, and you would take that as one more thing you cannot keep up.

The chewing is not a discipline problem. It is what a mind does when it is carrying something it cannot put down, and it goes round because it has nowhere to set it.

You have somewhere to set it, and it is not your own head. 1 Peter 5:7 says casting all your care upon Him, for He careth for you, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes casting an actual motion a person can perform rather than a nice idea about worry. The reason it comes round again is that it has not been put anywhere. It is still in your hands, going round.

What it means that the hour is His already

One more thing, and then we go to the practical end.

You have been thinking of the walk as your hour, which you then fail to use well. That framing puts all the weight on you: your hour, your attention, your failure.

But the garden was His before it was theirs, and the cool of the day was His habit before it was their appointment. So the walk you take is not primarily your discipline. It is a place He is already in, at an hour He already keeps.

Which changes what arriving means. You are not summoning anything. You are not generating a spiritual atmosphere on a field edge. You are turning up somewhere occupied.

You are turning up somewhere occupied, and the presence there does not depend on your having noticed it yesterday. Psalm 24:1 says the earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that ownership a felt thing on a top track above a reservoir rather than a doctrine about creation. You do not bring Him to the walk. You arrive where He is.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than chew things over.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed anyone plants. Not the quality of your attention on a lane. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.