#9 Hide & Seek
Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD
God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from
the LORD God among the trees of the garden.
But the LORD God called to the man, "Where are you?" [Genesis
3:8-9]
I remember playing “hide & seek” with my two oldest children when
they were about 2 and 7, and trying very hard not to find them too soon, and
pretending I didn’t even know which room they were in. But I obviously spent
too much time trying to find them as they fidgeted and made noises in their
hiding places so that I would find them. It was then that I realized that the
object of “hide & seek” was not to hide, but to be found. There exists in
all of us, from the time of Adam & Eve, the desire to be found, whether or
not we have done something wrong. There is a joy in being found.[1]
And when we are down and feeling sorry for ourselves, perhaps having our
own “pity party,” God comes looking for us, keeps looking for us, to find us,
and to bring us home. But sometimes we have to make some noise or gesture so
that He knows we need to be found and comforted. In the parable of the Prodigal
Son, the son makes the first move towards home, but the father has been keeping
an eye out for him and spots him coming up the path.
After they have eaten of the forbidden fruit, God searches for Adam and
Eve for their normal evening walk together and asks the most important question
to human kind: “Where are you?”[2].
And that first question we must all answer – where are we? Are we hiding under
bushels of disappointments, crushed by despair, mired in misery, lost in a fog
or ground down by grudges we have been carrying for far too long? Just as Adam
and Eve made coverings for themselves to hide their nakedness, we “cover up”
our sins, afraid to expose our guilt. But we have to admit that we are lost
before we can be found.
Yet we have this promise from the Scriptures: “But if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us
our sins, and purify us from all righteousness.” [I
John 1:9] The apostle John knew this well, because in his gospel he always
refers to himself as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.”
So God keeps searching for us, as the poem the Hound of Heaven[3]
says so well. God is the bridegroom, searching for His bride, calling us, the
shepherd looking for His lost sheep. As John Newton wrote in his hymn Amazing
Grace: “I was lost but now am found, I was
blind but now I see.”
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