SPIRITUAL HIDING

Sometimes we don't have much of a sense for God's presence in our lives, but there's no mystery to it at all.  The truth is that our desire for God can be pretty selective.  Sometimes we don't want God to be around.

Dallas Willard writes about a two-and-a-half-year-old girl in the backyard who one day discovered the secret to making mud (which she called "warm chocolate").  Her grandmother had been reading and was facing away from the action, but after cleaning up what was to her a mess, she told little Larissa not to make any more chocolate and turned her chair around so as to be facing her granddaughter.

The little girl soon resumed her "warm chocolate" routine, with one request posed as sweetly as a two-and-a-half-year-old can make it: "Don't look at me, Nana.  Okay?"

Nana (being a little codependent) of course agreed.

Larissa continued to manufacture warm chocolate.  Three times she said, as she continued her work, "Don't look at me, Nana, Okay?"

Then Willard writes, "Thus the tender soul of a little child shows us how necessary it is to us that we be unobserved in our wrong."

Any time we choose to do wrong or to withhold doing right, we choose hiddenness as well.  It may be that out of all the prayers that are ever spoken, the most common one -- the quietest one, the one that we least acknowledge making -- is simply this: Don't look at me, God.

-- John Ortberg in God Is Closer Than You Think

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