Hide and seek is a game that kids have enjoyed forever.  It was a terrific game to play just before the streetlights came on, which was our curfew call.  In the dusk of a summer’s evening, we would alternate between the hushed excitement of hiding in silence and the anxious searching for our friends and siblings lying in covert. 

Hide and seek is a great game, but a lousy metaphor for our relationship with God.  Sometimes we get the idea that God is hiding from us, that finding God is a reward for an arduous quest, or the result of some special kind of insight, like recognizing Waldo on a page crowded elbow to ear lobe.  When we feel down or deeply sense our own imperfections and failures, we can easily believe that we are just not good enough to find God.  We can come to believe that maybe the ability to recognize and know God is like having freckles: either you’re born with the tendency or you’re not.

All this might make sense from a human perspective, but it fails to account for the nature of God.  Which is not to hide, but to seek.  Paul reminds us in Romans 10:20 what God says about hide and seek: “I have been found by those who did not seek me; I have shown myself to those who did not ask for me.”  Encountering God is not a quest we make to reach God, but a rescue that God launches to find us.

As we walk through Holy Week, we experience the meaning and culmination of what was begun in Bethlehem.  God in Christ has sought us out in the earthly life of Jesus.  Christ would not stop searching.  He sought us even in his suffering and death.  He has shown himself to those who did not ask him and found those who did not seek him. 

Prayer:  Thank you, loving God, for seeking and finding me even at the cost of the death of your beloved Son.  Amen.