Hide and seek

Hide and seek

But God’s work is revealed in his light

John 3:19-21 God’s light came into the world, but people loved the darkness more than the light, for their actions were evil. All who do evil hate the light and refuse to go near it for fear their sins will be exposed. But those who do what is right come to the light so others can see God at work in what they are doing.

I just spent a weekend with my grandchildren. They love, love, love playing hide and seek, from the baby to the six-year-old. The two three-year-olds can’t bear for long the tension of being hidden: “Here I am! I’m here!” The six-year-old can wait a long time in his increasingly inventive hiding places.

Shutterstock: A3pfamily

In the course of their play, this six-year-old knocked his sister to the ground. Immediately he said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” and rushed to help her get up. I noticed, though, that minutes after she was happily off chasing her cousin, my grandson stood in place, tears pooling in his eyes. When I asked him what was wrong, the tears overflowed.

“I didn’t want to hurt Talita,” he sobbed. “I did something bad.”

I had a choice: Try to convince him that accidents happen and not to worry about it; Talita was fine. Or honor his sense of wrongdoing. “Sweetheart,” I said, “there’s something we can do when we’ve done wrong.”

“What?” he asked, wiping his eyes on his sleeve.

“We can tell God what we did and ask him to forgive us. When we do that, he promises to make our hearts clean. Would you like to do that?”

After doing so, he stood for a moment looking at the floor, then gave me a brilliant smile and ran to find his sister and cousins.

And I had the joy of seeing God at work, lifting my grandson’s distress from his shoulders.

You and I have the same opportunity: to bring our wrongdoing to the light so we can receive forgiveness and restoration of our joy and freedom. Often this requires restitution as well for the way we have hurt someone.

We may think we’re protecting ourselves when we hide our sin, but in fact we’re internalizing the harm we did, thus dimming our internal light, making it harder to see our own hearts clearly. We need the Holy Spirit to shine his light, to seek and find and deal with what is hurting us inside.

If we claim we have no sin, we are only fooling ourselves and not living in the truth. But if we confess our sins to God, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness (1 John1:8-9).