Hide and Seek

Do you have memories of favourite childhood games? Tag or ‘It’, Stuck in the Mud, Bulldog – which I never understood the rules of but was repeatedly banned because it was too violent – and that was in an all-girls convent school!

Hide and seek was always particularly exciting because you couldn’t play it just anywhere, but did you prefer to be the hider or the seeker?  The most disappointing outcome was when you picked too good a hiding place and waited and waited, initially chuffed you’d found such a good place, but then increasingly bored. Had the seekers given up, or been called off for teatime and forgotten you? You’d usually be in a rather unappealing place, squished into some cupboard, hidden under a bed amidst the dust and dead spiders, so the game then lost its gloss.

We often talk about faith and God as if we were the seekers. We talk about the search for God, or the pursuit of faith, and we have bible backing for these images; “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find”. But it can then feel like we’re playing some cosmic ‘hide and seek’ where God hides and we have to look into all the nooks and crannies to try to find him; and at times, that search feels hopeless, because troubles in our own lives, or in our world, lead us to despair of finding God’s ‘hiding place’.

The parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin turn that game of hide and seek on its head. God, Jesus invites us to understand, is the one doing the seeking; God is like a shepherd who has lost just one of his flock, but goes searching for it, through the wilderness, until he finds it. And God is like a woman who loses just 1 of her 10 coins, but searches persistently until she retrieves it.

Just think about that – you are the one sheep, you are the single coin – and God won’t stop seeking for you, however far you’ve wandered, however lost you feel. God needs you, wants you, longs for you to come home.

So we should search for God, especially in the dark and unlikely places; but God isn’t hiding from us, God’s already out looking for you.

Lord, please find me and bring me home into your company today.

Revd Kate McFarlane