Where is your hiding place? When things get tough, hostile, embarrassing, uncomfortable, where do you withdraw to?
“He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.” Psalm 91:4 NIV
I have recently been reading a book by Emily P. Freeman where she says “What you believe about God and yourself and the world becomes your hiding place.”
“What you believe about God and yourself and the world becomes your hiding place.”
Emily P. Freeman, Grace for the Good Girl: Letting Go of the Try-Hard life.
I think she’s right, and also, I recognise that in times of stress and trouble I’m not always believing the right things, which means I’m not always going to the right places to hide.
It makes me think of kids in house fires. You only have to watch a few tv series, or a few of those fire fighter documentaries to realise that in a house fire kids don’t always make their way out of the fire, even if the family has a clear escape plan, and that many times they will hide, withdrawing to a place they consider safe to avoid the thing they are scared of, in this case the fire.
Under different circumstances, like if an intruder made their way into the house, this hiding place could be the perfect place for the child to go to avoid obvious danger, but in the case of a fire, with fire fighters risking their lives in a desperate attempt to find these terrified kids, a safe place quickly becomes a dangerous place. How often can the same be said of us as Christians?
If I am faced with some kind of trouble, but what I believe about myself, the world or God, doesn’t line up with his big T truth, then I can find myself withdrawing to a place of danger. I could listen to a negative internal voice that reinforces lies spoken over me. I could take my problem to someone with no ability to solve it, allowing myself to dwell on the negative instead of trusting God to be the solution. I could turn to things in the physical world to numb the pain of whatever I am experiencing.
All of these options achieve a few things, they prevent me from accessing true freedom. They keep me trapped in a place where the only guaranteed outcome is that I will be hurt. And they prevent me from connecting with God on a deeper level.
I can’t tell you exactly what you need to believe about God, yourself, and the world, so that you can avoid hiding in the wrong places, because I’m still learning them.
What I can tell you is that the Bible gives us many examples of what to believe, it repeats the same information over, and over, and over again, in a variety of different ways, with a variety of different people.
I encourage you to start looking at the stories in the Bible. See how God interacted with Moses, with Noah, with David, with the disciples. See how the father interacted with the prodigal. Or how the shepherd cared for the sheep. You are loved as uniquely as each of these, God cares for you as deeply.
Then once you have started making yourself aware of these truths about God, see if you are hiding according to them, or according to lies you are believing.