Thursday, October 1, 2015

Out of Hiding
By Elin Henderson

“…and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.”
Genesis 3:8 (NKJV, emphasis added)

We all know that feeling as parents. We walk into a room, spot a disaster of some kind, and encounter a silence like no other. There isn’t a soul to be found, seen or heard. And we all know what has happened: Someone is hiding and, generally speaking, it is the perpetrator!
           
From the time we are little, the number one response to doing wrong is usually hiding. This negative behavior is nothing new but, in fact, is as old as mankind itself. If you think about it, it was the first response to sin. Adam and Eve knew they had sinned and they HID themselves. Imagine the silence God encountered when He came down to walk with them in the garden that day!

Now granted, as we get older, the hiding takes on different forms. It may or may not be physical hiding. We might hide emotionally from people by always keeping our relationships shallow. We might hide spiritually by avoiding encounters with spiritual people or places. Either way, we see our nakedness - - our bare emptiness and failure - - and we retreat to those bushes where we think we can find safety and security. Then, like Adam and Eve, we try and cover ourselves with leaves from those same bushes, like somehow that will hide our nakedness. What we really end up hiding is who we really are. We try and appear in a “clothed” form that isn’t really “us.”

It isn’t hard to hide from people. They are easily fooled. In fact, we may encounter many friends in the bushes with us, or walking around in the same leaf outfits. Sometimes the guise goes so far that we even fool ourselves.

Hiding from God, though, is another story. He knows the ugly, naked truth of where we are, who we are, and what we have done, but unlike a world that would judge us or be fooled by us, he looks on us with love. He gently allures us from our hiding places and graciously covers us with His clothes of splendor. He keeps who we are as individuals intact, but covers us and makes us presentable so that we can stand unashamed!

GOING DEEPER:
1. What are some reasons we hide? (Ex: fear, shame, regret…)
2. Who else can you think of in Scripture who tried this “Hiding Tactic” either with other people or God? (Hint: Moses, Jacob…)

FURTHER READING:

Oakwood’s missionaries Elin Henderson (a registered nurse) and her husband Phil serve as church planters with New Tribes in Mozambique, Africa.  Elin is mother to fourteen-year-old Callie and twelve-year-old Elias.