"If I Can't See You, You Can't See Me..."

If I had ignored my sins, the Lord would not have listened to me - Psalm 66:18 (GNB)

What was your fave childhood game? Everyone has got their own individual choice, but if there was ever a top 100 of children's games, you can bet that somewhere in the top ten would probably be Hide & Seek. The idea is so, so simple, which is why it's a perfect kids game: people hide somewhere during an allocated amount of time, and then someone has to find them. The last person to be found is the winner and automatically becomes the new "seeker". Hooray!

It's a really, really fun game. I often play it with my little cousins, who are, putting it bluntly, amazing hiders. One person I can't play it with, however, is God. It is pretty much impossible to play Hide & Seek with the Big Man Upstairs. Why? Well, first things first, you can't see God. You can see God working in people and places and things, but the actual presence of God? Nope, can't make him out.

Secondly, (and here's the biggest reason), no matter how well we try and hide ourselves, no matter which secret cupboards we crawl into, how many duvets we try and cover ourselves with, we cannot hide from God. He can still see us - he knows where we are, what we're doing, what we're thinking. If we ever did play Hide & Seek with God you can bet it would be the quickest game in history.

Sometimes we forget that God can do this. Most of the time it's when we're doing something that we know we shouldn't, because its not what he wants. I know I forget frequently that God can see me; when I do remember, its too late - the damage has been done. You get a really horrible guilty feeling inside of you. The only thing worse than this is when we then try and hide the things we've done wrong, as if they've never even happened. There is simply no point to this whatsoever. As this week's passage points out, it actually damages our relationship with God even more so than the things we do wrong!

We cannot simply hide the things we do wrong; we cannot ignore our sins. What God wants us to do is admit that we've done them. It doesn't have to be a grand public revelation either, because that proves nothing. It can be a very simple, quiet acknowledgement that we have done something wrong. And what's amazing is that we don't need to be afraid of God because when we do this and say sorry and mean it he always, always, always forgives us. And then that horrible guilty feeling vanishes and we feel different and inspired to start afresh.

God knows we're not perfect; he expects us to get things wrong from time to time. What he wants us to do is to realise and accept it too. Because then we can start to have a better relationship with him, a father/child relationship that actually works. And that's a really good relationship to have.

Laters.