Playing Hide and Seek with God

Does God live in your house? In your place of work? In the busyness of your life? Or do you (like many of us) "save" God for worship services, religious holidays, Bible readings, or church work? Do we think that God prefers stained glass and pews to a tree decked out in autumn colors, or a good time shared with a friend?

I've been guilty of choosing when and where I could meet God and experience his love. I've thought, "I can find him on a retreat, but not when I'm driving the carpool. He can speak to me from the Bible, but not from a TV show." But when I arbitrarily decide where God can be found and where he can't I've drastically curtailed his avenues of reaching out to me. It makes about as much sense a not opening a gift because we weren't planning on it being wrapped that way! Every moment of every day holds the possibility of encountering God's love.

Nicholas of Gusa, a fifteenth century bishop, is reported to have said, "God is he whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere." If you think about that for very long, it will fill you with awe. There is the same feeling reading Paul's claim in Romans 11: "From him and through him and for him are all things."  In Genesis we see that God's original intention seemed to have been an intimate and perpetual communion with his creation. But human beings began to lose touch with the sense of God's presence everywhere, all the time. During the Exodus, the Israelites began to think of God's presence localized with the Ark of the Covenant. As Old Testament history progressed, God's presence was considered to be enthroned in the temple in Jerusalem. The splitting of sacred and secular had begun.

With the coming of Jesus also came an incredible expansion of the perception of God in the world. God was now among us in human form. It was Jesus who re-established the fullness of intimate communion with the Father. At his death, the curtain of the Temple was literally torn in two -- God was  no longer hidden behind a veil.

Evelyn Underhill observed that we are surrounded on all sides by God. But often we're no more conscious of him than we are of the air we breathe. Why is that?

When I was in grade school the art teacher, Mrs. Muncie, was always bustling around so busily that she'd get easily sidetracked and forget what she started to do. The joke of the class was that Mrs. Muncie was always losing her glasses and her keys -- she'd run around frantically, accusing us of taking them, when most of the time the glasses were stuck on top of her head and the keys were laying in plain sight on the desk where she'd put them. It's the same sort of nonsensical thing we do with God: he's right here in plain sight, brimming over with love for us, while we run around frantically crying "Where is God?"

But knowing God is everywhere and realizing he's with you is only the beginning. How many times my children have come to me to tell me something important to them, and I was busy and distracted and didn't listen with my full attention. Being truly present to one another requires that we be open to each other, that we really listen. It's the same way with God: we need to clear away the distractions and stand ready to let him in.

A group of scholars came to see a religious teacher, who surprised them by asking what seemed to be a foolish question: "Where is the dwelling place of God?" The scholars laughed and replied, "What a thing to ask! Is not the whole world full of his glory?" The teacher smiled and said, "God dwells wherever man lets him in." In the book of James we read a similar statement, "Draw near to God and he will draw near to you."

When my daughter Joanna was little, she loved to play hide and seek. A favorite hiding place was behind the living room curtain. She would stand as still as a statue, waiting while I "searched" for her. What she didn't realize was that her little feet stuck out from beneath the curtain, and of course I could always see immediately where she was. But I would pretend to look for her, with my running commentary of "Joanna, where ARE you? Now where can that girl be?" and so on. Then I'd make a great show of discovering her: "There you are! I looked everywhere!" She'd giggle with delight and the game would begin again, with Jo never realizing that I'd known all along where she was. "Where are you, Jo?" I'd call, searching her out because I loved her and wanted to find her.

And so it is with God -- he loved humankind enough to search us out before we even knew we were lost. Even when we think we're hidden from him, our feet showing from under the curtain give us away every time. And just as Joanna shrieked with laughter when I "found" her, we can feel similar excitement and joy when we let God find us.

God dwells where we let him in. In our homes, in our cars, at our workplaces, standing in line at the grocery store. He is with us where we are.

Even when we think we're hiding.


(adapted from a devotional given at Sunset Presbyterian Church in about 1982).

Listening for the Silence

"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven...a time to keep silence, and a time to speak." (Eccles. 3:1-7)

I have to admit that a lot of the time I don't feel that there's much silence in my life. So often, so many needs clamor for my attention! There are days that the phone seems to ring every time I try to start any job at all. The noise of TV, the washer and dryer, the dishwasher, the vacuum cleaner, the doorbell, and on and on. And when school's out each afternoon, it's "Mom, I need help with my homework," or "Mom, I need a new folder for my class" or "Mom, I'm starving - I can't wait til dinner!"

If God tries to talk to me, how can I hear him over all the noise? How I sometimes long for silence!

And yet there are times when I do have that silence, and my soul is uneasy because I can't feel God's presence at all. What is happening when we can't hear God? Is God then mute?

When persons lose their hearing, children still laugh, birds still sing. The loss of hearing means that one's ears no longer interpret the vibration of the sounds around them, not that the sounds themselves cease. Those persons out of necessity sometimes learn to compensate by developing other methods of "hearing."

When I can't hear God, I also must compensate, by holding on to my faith even when I can't feel Him or hear Him. What are we to think about those times that we can't hear God, when we feel alone and forsaken?

In the Winter, leaves are stripped from the trees, flowers die, grass turns brown. Birds fly away and animals go into hiding. But then something wonderful happens -- Spring comes. And we realize that winter comes, but it doesn't endure forever. So it is in our lives. We will certainly have times of loneliness or feeling forsaken, but they will not endure forever. God has promised never to abandon us. Those silences are like seeds and bulbs lying dormant in the earth, waiting for spring. As the writer of Ecclesiastes tells us, all of life has cycles and seasons. Faith gets us through the Winter of our lives, because we know that Spring will follow. Contentment comes with learning to weather all seasons, even those of doubt and silence.

Life is full of paradoxes. Birth is death from the womb. Death is birth into the hereafter. Jesus died so that we might live. Paradoxes seem to be separated by a thin curtain. Our perception depends on which side of that curtain we stand. If I walk from this room into the next one, you see me as leaving. But a person standing in that other room sees me as arriving.

A much-loved children's book, The Velveteen Rabbit, describes what many of us might consider ugly and reveals the beauty within. In a nursery scene, an old rocking horse, the Skin Horse, befriends a rather new and uncertain Rabbit. Their encounter goes like this:

The Skin Horse had lived in the nursery longer than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away. He knew that they were only toys and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.

     "What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"
     
     "Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

     "Does it hurt?"

     "Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

     "Does it happen all at once, like being wound up, or bit by bit?" 

     "It doesn't happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or who have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."


Well, if ugliness can be beauty, and leaving can be arriving, and dying is birth into another existence, is it possible that silence might even be hearing? Perhaps in some ways our souls hear best in silence.

When my girls were younger there were times I had to send them to their room to rest. They didn't usually like it and sometimes felt that I was shutting them out, but I knew that it was time they needed to rest and recharge. Can it be that God deals with us the same way? When we are feeling shut out, could God be allowing us to regenerate in quietness? Can what we perceive to be negative actually be positive?

I think the story of the Velveteen Rabbit and the Skin Horse can speak to all of us. In order to become REAL, a conscious child of God, you and I may be asked to endure long silences that at first hold no meaning for us. The process may hurt sometimes. It may not happen all at once. We may have to "become" and it may take a long time. Maybe that's why becoming REAL doesn't happen to people who break easily, or who have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Maybe, by the time we become REAL, most of our hair will be loved off, our eyes will drop out, and we will be loose in the joints and very shabby! But these things don't matter at all, because once we are REAL, we can't be ugly--except to people who don't understand.

So I hold on to the assurance that there is indeed a time and a purpose to everything.

Even silence.


(presented as a devotional to Sunset Presbyterian Church weekly prayer group, probably in late 1980s).