when I want to hide
It makes me want to hide.
I type the words–vulnerable, the most honest ones I can offer, into my text to Kevin, curling my phone in exactly the way I want to curl myself, further and further away, until I’ve hidden all the tender parts of me. This day, so heavy with life, feels so full of need and responsibility that it stretches for years. Stress knots up my neck until I ache. I want to hide. And hasn’t it always been this way? From the beginning, from that very first step humans took away from the shelter of God, brokenness left us looking for a hideout.
Sitting low on the floor, knees drawn in, I tie my tennis shoes, and then, unbending myself only to go, I take to the street, intentionally uncurling my fingers to open my empty palms. With every step I list the slicing things I carry, naming them like ghouls, dropping them before God like shards from the busted picture frame I tossed away this morning. Autism, epilepsy, diabetes, oh Lord, that rigidity, those obsessions that make us crazy; the way the world just isn’t safe for my kids. I gasp, my breath stolen by grief.
I want to run away.
I whisper it softly, tasting the words, imagining the lightness. I am Jonah, maybe, on that ship that smells of fish and brine and seaweed, only now I’m running to God instead of away from Him. This morning, in the waking hours, my fingers traced the words:
You are my true tower of strength,
Psalm 94:23 TPT
my safe place, my hideout, my true shelter.
You are my hideout. In the unbroken Kingdom, God is safety. I can run so many ways, can hide in so many visible places, but it seems there’s just the one good Way for a mama to find some peace. The only good hiding is God hiding me. So I open my hands, because I don’t have the strength for all this carrying.
I’ve played hide and seek for years, been to Tarshish a thousand times. Little girl days, in the way, way back of my parents’ station wagon, in the seat that always faced the past, I hid, running clear way for miles. I imagined that the floor of that sprawling car opened into a cozy hobbit hole lit with a fire, the kind of deceptively warm, tucked away place Mr. Tumnus lives in Narnia, a sleepy place to escape the trip. Maybe my hiding began with my imagination, but it matured until I also hid in anger, in the over-busyness of my work, in relationships, even deep within my own pride.
But God came looking, came running at the sight of me. God brought me home.
And now, when brokenness leaves me naked, I know to go back, back, back to true shelter, the One that existed before my life–before all of life–began. God needs no context and no explanations. And as I walk this road dropping the hard things in His hands, the burning tears, that ripping grief closing up my throat, at last begins to ease.
