Playing Hide and Seek (with God)

Right away I want to look into this locked box! I want to go to Secret Hiding Places.com and check it out. Tell the truth. Didn't you LOVE playing Hide and Seek when you were younger? Maybe you still, on occasion, get a kick out of waiting for your husband, wife or one of your kids to pass by the doorway where you are hiding so you can jump out and startle them silly. All in fun. Of course! Just choose your timing carefully. No one carrying hot coffee or precious cargo or anything.

One of the first comments our kids screamed to each other the first time we brought them to the house we were buying almost 18 years ago was "This will be great for Hide and Seek!" And they were off hiding and seeking. Should the fact that a place is great for hide and seek be a selling/purchasing factor? I would say it is worth considering when the family has going on 7 children, then growing to be 8. The house we were moving from had the MOST awesome rope swing ever, over a dry gully, that sold me when I watched my kids swing out far and wide as we were checking out homes for ownership. (When we had settled in Rope Swing house I would give it a swing myself while they napped and I was between pregnancies).ANYWAY.....

This morning I opened to page 1003 in my Bible. Ok. It was a morning of reading where I opened, because where I opened grabbed my attention. On page 1003 in my Bible is part of Psalm 139 along with side notes for referrence and then a section on Birth Control and being Stewards of Procreation. So anyway I stopped there. The part of the scripture that held me was this:

Where can I go from Your Spirit?
Or where can I flee from Your presence?


If I ascend into heaven, You are there;
If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.


If I take the wings of the morning,
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,


Even there Your hand shall lead me,
And Your right hand shall hold me.


If I say, "Surely the darkness shall fall on me,"
Even the night shall be light about me;


Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from You,
But the night shines as the day,
The darkness and the light are both alike to You.
Psalm 139: 7-12

That got me thinking. No matter where I might go, no matter where I might think I am hidden from God, I am not. No matter how dark my circumstances may seem, they do not hide me from Him and His hand to lead me out. His hand to hold me. Even if I may have messed up and want to hide from Him, He is the One who is the Good Shepherd Who will leave the flock to find the one lost sheep...

Are there days you just want to hide from life? Well maybe not for some of you but I know I have.
But what kinds of places do we hide in? Shopping. Drugs (legal or not). Poor relationship choices. Hobbies. Work. Alcohol. Food. Bed. The problem with those hiding places is they have the potential to turn in to places that trap us. Hang on there a minute. Let me be clear. If you are prescribed a med you need, use it, just don't misuse it. The ones not prescribed are illegal so do not even go there. I could expound on each of the listed hiding places but for the sake of space and wanting to keep blogs brief enough just to jolt something awake in us like a quick espresso I won't.

The flip side of all this is that we can hide ourselves in Him. (do you see it? The I in HIM?) Psalm 32:7 tells us:
You are our hiding place;
You shall preserve me from trouble,
You shall surround me with songs of deliverance    Selah

Psalm 91 also tells us:
He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High
Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.