Coming Out of Hiding: What Genesis Taught Me About Anxiety
It started in the garden.
Shame. Hiding. Fear.
I’ve been studying Genesis 1–3 this week during my morning devotion time, and something struck me that I haven’t been able to shake. We tend to think of anxiety as a modern problem — a nervous system issue, a byproduct of too much noise and too little rest. And it is that. But the pattern of anxiety, the instinct to cover and conceal the moment something feels broken, didn’t start with us. It started in the garden, in the first moments after the fall, when Adam and Eve did something that would become the template for every anxious heart that followed: they hid.
The Original Response
Before the fall, Scripture tells us Adam and Eve were naked and unashamed. No hiding, no covering, no distance between them and God or between them and each other. Then came the fracture — and with it, an entirely new set of instincts. Shame arrived first. Then hiding. Then fear.
What strikes me most is what wasn’t the original response to broken fellowship with God. It wasn’t confession. It was concealment. Adam covered the outside with fig leaves — a physical fix for a spiritual wound. And when God came looking for him in the cool of the day, He didn’t lead with accusation. He asked questions that exposed the source instead of the symptom:
“Where are you?”
“Who told you that you were naked?”
God has always been more interested in healing the heart than simply changing the appearance.
That line has stayed with me all week. Because if I’m honest, I still sew my own fig leaves. Not literal ones — but the modern equivalents. Busyness. Control. The performance of having it together. Perfectionism dressed up as diligence. Self-reliance dressed up as strength. None of those coverings were ever meant to restore what’s actually broken. They just make the outside look manageable while the inside stays hidden.
Why This Matters for Anxiety
I’ve had conversations recently about the difference between simply telling someone anxious to “take it to Jesus” and actually understanding what anxiety is doing. I think Genesis gives us a clue. If hiding was the original coping mechanism for shame and fear, then a lot of what we now call anxiety might be what happens when we keep hiding in a world we were actually created for open-faced fellowship with God.
“Take it to Jesus” isn’t a dismissal of anxiety when we understand it rightly. It’s literally the reversal of the hiding. It’s coming out from behind the fig leaves — not because we’ve earned the right to be seen, but because God has never stopped calling us out of concealment and back into His presence. That’s what He was doing in the garden when He asked “Where are you?” He knew exactly where Adam was. The question wasn’t for God’s benefit. It was an invitation for Adam to stop hiding and answer.
Faith as the Way Out of Hiding
This is where the thread of my book, Faith Over Fear: A Healing Journey, connects directly back to Eden. Faith over fear was never meant to be a one-time victory — a single decision you make and then never revisit. It’s a moment-by-moment choice to trust the character of God over the voice of fear. Every anxious thought becomes another invitation to believe that God is who He says He is, rather than retreating into whatever fig leaves feel safest that day.
Perhaps faith is simply answering the call to come out of hiding — again and again, for as long as it takes.
Because faith over fear was never about having extraordinary faith. It’s about placing our mustard-seed faith in an extraordinary God. Every moment we choose to trust Him over fear is another step out of hiding and into His presence — the same presence Adam and Eve walked away from in the garden, and the same presence God has been calling His children back into ever since.
If you’re in a season where hiding feels safer than being seen — in your fear, your grief, your diagnosis, your uncertainty — I’d encourage you to ask yourself the same question God asked in the garden. Not as an accusation, but as an invitation: Where are you?
He already knows. He’s just waiting for you to answer.
This reflection grew out of my morning devotion time in Genesis 1–3, and it’s part of the ongoing thread running through Faith Over Fear: A Healing Journey — the belief that faith isn’t the absence of fear, but the daily, moment-by-moment choice to trust God in spite of it. If this resonates with you, I’d love for you to explore more on my website or reach out and share your own story.