Do you have a love hate, hide and seek relationship with the time you spend alone with God, as I sometimes do? What causes us to alternate between periods of avoiding and craving time with God? This is something I have been pondering recently, and I’ve discovered some of the things that drive my hide and seek behavior. What drives your pattern of hide and seek?When I hide, it can be for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it is because I am already too aware of how many things I could do better, do more of, do less of, etc. I am anxious about going before him with a unresponsive heart, but equally anxious about going and discovering one more thing to work on. At other times I hide because I sin, and I struggle to manage the mystery and tension between free grace and unconditional love on one side and the call to holiness and fatherly discipline on the other. It can almost paralyze me. This plays in with the third reason I find myself hiding: the times that my trust in God’s goodness is low, especially in his goodness for me in the present. I allow hard seasons, slow change, or delayed responses to prayer to weaken my faith. I never need to be reminded not to expect a sugar-daddy God to encourage me in narcissism, but I can sometimes struggle to remain steeped in the promise that our heavenly Father is good and is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him.
When I do seek, the reasons are just as varied. Often it is because I want to learn. Finding joy in knowing and understanding is part of how God wired me. More frequently, I seek because I remember how good it is to be with God despite all of the reasons I may have for hiding. Experience has taught me that in both obvious and mysterious ways, my days are better when I have spent time with God. It especially helps to focus me on actions and values that are most important to me, and it reduces the anxiety of knowing that the tasks and needs in my life are greater than the hours and resources I have. Of course, the most important reason I seek is that I simply desire to be with the One who loves me, to know him and enjoy his company. I suspect that this needs to become the main motivation if I am going to do a lot more seeking and a lot less hiding.
I am going to schedule some time to reflect on how to reinforce the things that drive my seeking and weaken the things that drive my hiding. What suggestions do you have? What are the primary drivers of your hide and seek behavior? How could you make progress toward doing more seeking and less hiding?