The God who makes all things new is not creating a world where we must finally get everything right, but a world where there is nothing left to hide from. The God who wipes away tears, death, mourning, and pain also wipes away shame. And when we see one another the way God sees us — when we see ourselves the way God sees us — there is no hiding in the garden. There is only being fully known, and fully held.

But in idolizing the past we keep the present locked in amber, always yearning for something different in the opposite direction of where God is calling us. The Good News for a human condition inclined to idolize the past and sentimentalize the present is that once the Israelites reached their promise to Abraham, the promise didn't stop.

Each of us, in one way or another, participates in systems that prize performance over mercy filling forms, meeting targets, curating images, translating our worth into metrics. And that is the human condition revealed in this text: we take God’s truth and intention for us and turn them into instruments of control: our truth, our standard, our measure for others.