If you are sitting in the shade right now,
it does not mean you’ve failed.
Perhaps you’ve simply sat down for a moment,
or perhaps—only now—you are beginning to hear
the true voice rising from deep within your heart.
Human beings are all born in the shade.
Before light, we grow in darkness:
in the mother’s womb, in closed rooms, in quiet spaces,
we begin to breathe.
The shade is not the enemy of life;
it is the place where life is prepared,
the place where God’s grace is quietly experienced.
“Adam, where are you?”
God came to Adam, who had hidden himself in the shade after sinning.
It was not a voice of judgment,
but the voice of One calling out to the lost.
The shade was where God’s gaze reached,
and where His calling began again.
And even now,
God is calling each of us by name.
Even when I sit in the shade,
He has not let me go—He continues to call.
When He calls my name,
will I rise and stand like a flower before Him?
Or will I once again shrink back in fear,
and turn away from His voice?
But if I’m honest,
I did not even know He was calling my name.
I was too buried in my work, my responsibilities, my exhaustion.
God’s voice was not heard within me,
and it took me a long time to realize why.
I was consumed with the things of the world:
pleasure, achievement, approval, and the things I loved.
All the while,
God was still calling my name,
but I didn’t even notice.
I was too busy, too distracted,
and above all, too deeply immersed in the world I had built for myself.
How grieved He must have been,
watching me ignore His call.
I was drowning in the world,
turning away from His gaze.
Yet God, with a love that compels,
and a touch so gentle—lest I break—
knocked softly and persistently,
to turn my eyes back to Him.
But I didn’t understand
what that quiet knocking meant.
Instead, I rejected that gentle touch,
and turned my eyes once again
toward myself, toward the world.
So I became endlessly busy,
running back and forth,
trying to solve everything through the world’s lens.
It was only after much time had passed
that I finally realized:
God had been calling me all along.
It was a realm I had never truly experienced before.
It defied reason,
and could not be explained by human intellect or worldly wisdom.
No book, no logic,
could explain that moment.
I simply knew:
God was calling me,
and I could no longer run.
I finally stopped at His hand.
In a moment I could no longer deny,
I quietly turned to look back over my life.
And I realized:
all that I had chased with such effort—
was so hollow, so empty,
a polished shell with no substance.
It was like waking from a long sleep,
like recognizing my true self again after endless wandering.
At last, I became aware of God’s presence,
and I could no longer deny Him.
And to my amazement,
His hand did not condemn me.
There was no scolding, no harshness,
only a voice that seemed to say:
“I have been waiting for you all along.”