Tag: hiding place

Flashback

But God will restore, cleanse, guide, and shelter

Isaiah 4:5-6 Then the Lord will provide a canopy of cloud during the day and smoke and flaming fire at night, covering the glorious land. It will be a shelter from daytime heat and a hiding place from storms and rain.

Psalm 31: 19-20, 32:7 How great is the goodness you have stored up for those who fear you. You lavish it on those who come to you for protection, blessing them before the watching world. You hide them in the shelter of your presence, safe from those who conspire against them. You shelter them in your presence, far from accusing tongues … You are my hiding place; you protect me from trouble. You surround me with songs of victory.

Whenever I see or hear the words “hiding place,” I flash back to a Saturday night Karis “should” have died. She was sixteen; I was with her at the hospital in São Paulo. Her eleven-year-old sister Valerie, home alone working on a project for school, sang “You are my hiding place … I will trust in you” over and over and over, afraid for Karis’s life.

Teen Karis with her sisters at Ibirapuera Park in São Paulo, sharing two pairs of rollerblades between the three of them

Meanwhile, the teens of our church were engaged with their regular weekly meeting. Suddenly one of them said, “We need to pray for Karis.” They didn’t even know she was in the hospital, but the entire group knelt and prayed for her until around midnight they sensed release from God. They only learned the next morning that at the time they felt compelled to pray, Karis’s fever had spiked beyond what the thermometer could measure, and she had managed to say “Goodbye, Mommy,” before passing out. Her doctor was struggling to reach the hospital through São Paulo traffic. Her nurse, too terrified to act, left it up to me to pack Karis in ice and, with the help of another nurse and an orderly holding her down—Karis was shaking uncontrollably—give her the injection the doctor had ordered before he jumped in his car. He repeated the injection, along with other emergency measures, the moment he arrived in her room, running full tilt up the stairs and through the hallways.

“Whenever I am afraid, I will trust in you.”

Isaiah too was afraid, of the judgment and stripping and violence he knew was coming (chapter three). He flashed back to the Exodus, when God had led his people escaping from slavery in Egypt with a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night (Exodus 13-14). These stories were part of the people of Israel’s identity, told and retold through the centuries to illustrate God’s care and protection when they were weak and vulnerable.

Have you experienced God as your hiding place? I would love to hear your story.

Where did you hide as a child?

But God is our refuge

Psalm 62:5-8 Let all that I am wait quietly before God, for my hope is in him. He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress where I will not be shaken. … O my people, trust in him at all times. Pour out your heart to him, for God is our refuge.

Philippians 4:6-7 Tell God what you need and thank him for all he has done. Then you will experience God’s peace.

Hebrews 4:16 Let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it most.

When you were a child, did you have a hiding place, somewhere you went to feel safe?

In my small childhood home (two bedrooms for a family of ten), there seemed nowhere to go except inside myself, and I became very good at finding that space. But at boarding school, I hid in two places. One was inside a narrow, covered stairwell with doors top and bottom. The other was high in a cypress tree at the property a block away where we went for recess.

Shutterstock: Air Images

In those spaces, even when I was small, I had a sense of God’s presence with me that I didn’t feel anywhere else. The world out there was too challenging, too crowded, too fraught and frightening. Often I was too flooded to sense he was there in the confusion of competing feelings. In secret, though, the Lord helped me regain my balance. When I’m upset, I can still imagine myself there, take some deep breaths, and begin to relax.

As an adult, hearing other people’s trauma stories, my heart went out to those who blamed God for what they had suffered and thus cut themselves off from his comfort. As a child, I didn’t blame God. I primarily blamed myself. I think it’s natural for children to feel they “should” be able to be “good enough” or “powerful enough” to diffuse the tensions, stress, anger, conflicts, and hurtful actions of the adults around them. Just try harder …

God, though, was my refuge. My rock. My place of safety long before I knew anything about Psalm 62, or Philippians 4 or Hebrews 4.

There were times when I doubted God’s power and goodness, when I couldn’t sense his Presence at all. In chapter 1 of Karis: All I See Is Grace, though, I describe a time of crisis when I was able to cry out to him and hear his response. He challenged me to trust him even though I could not understand. Why, if he is all-loving and all-powerful, he allows so much suffering in the world. Why he doesn’t do what I, in my great wisdom, think he should do.

Today, I am making the same choice: to trust. To pour out my heart to him. And then to wait quietly. For God is my refuge, my safety, my hiding place.

You too?