A little game of hide & seek

No one can hide where I cannot see him,” says the Lord. “I fill all of heaven and earth,” says the Lord. (Jeremiah 23:24)

As a young child, I used to play 'hide & seek' with neighborhood friends. It was a grand game because we lived in a neighborhood comprised of huge trees, fenced yards, grandiose rose gardens, and a shed or chicken coop in every back yard! In case you didn't catch my drift there, what made it a spectacular game is that there were innumerable ways to hide. To deal with the tendency of one to go the extra mile to hide out so they wouldn't be found, we'd set some limits like not climbing trees or venturing further away from the starting spot more than one house's distance. That meant there may be four yards to be searched, but there were times we'd say no one could leave the yard of the home where the game was being played. What we did by 'limiting' it to one home's yard was limit the hiding places and save whoever was 'it' from having to run hither and yon to find each of us. We still found great hiding places, but with all those limits on where we could hide, we were usually 'found out' in rather short order. 

There are innumerable ways to attempt to hide from God, but all of those ways are really not very effective, are they? The more we give of ourselves to God, the more we find our 'hiding places' shrinking - making it harder and harder to 'hide' from God. We still try, don't we? We find ourselves 'playing games' with him, hoping we won't have our sin discovered. In the end, we find the boundaries get smaller, the hiding places become less and less effective, and he already knows the best ones we have created! It is impossible to find a way to 'hide' from God what he already knows, but we try. The more we 'try', the worse we feel. The worse we feel, the harder we try to hunker down, so we won't 'get caught'. This life with God isn't a typical childhood 'hide & seek' game - it is a 'come to me and be free' game. In the childhood game, we waited until we thought the coast was clear, then we ran like mad to whatever we had designated as 'home' and hoped we'd make it there before whoever was seeking us would get there! We were free when we made it to home base. God's plan is that we realize that when we 'expose' ourselves, we don't have to run. We are free because we exposed ourselves to him! Just sayin!