Hide and Seek

(This is a short devotional I wrote for the Advent Devotional guide my church publishes every year. We use the daily Scripture texts from The Book of Common Prayer, and my selection is for Sunday, December 20, 2009.)

“Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’ ” Genesis 3:8, 9

When we played “hide and seek” as kids, the whole point of the game was to not be found. We wanted the “seeker” to take a long time to find us; we wanted to win the game by being the last one found. On the other hand, we also didn’t want to go too long without being found—we didn’t want the others to forget about us! We didn’t (and still don’t) want to be abandoned!

Sometimes, not only as children but also as adults, we hide because we are afraid. Maybe we’ve done something to make someone mad, to upset someone, and we are afraid of how they’ll react—we don’t want to be yelled at or punished! Maybe I know I’ve done something wrong, and I’m afraid something bad is going to happen as a result. In these verses in Genesis, “the man and his wife,” Adam and Eve, know they have done something wrong (see Gen. 3:7) and they are afraid because they listened to the serpent. They aren’t sure what’s going to happen to them.

Today, we can take comfort in the fact that God is still looking for us; he’s still pursuing us. It’s not that he doesn’t know where we are, but rather that he wants us to come to him, to reveal ourselves to him so that we can have a relationship with him again. At this Christmas season we remember that God is actively seeking us because he sent his only Son, Jesus Christ, to pursue us, to reveal God himself to us, to clear the way for us back to a relationship with God. Let’s celebrate his seeking us still.