WELCOME!
Steve Haley
L
President
Steve Rose
Executive Secretary
Douglas Hilliard
Treasurer
ike many games from years ago, I don’t think children play it now as much
as they did when I was growing up. In an era when there was no internet,
no video games, and television broadcast a total of four channels, urban kids like
those in my neighborhood had to be creative in order to have fun. Most of the time,
our fun took the form of being outside playing games.
It seems that there were a lot of positives to spending afternoon hours playing
basketball, football, and coasting on homemade skateboards. Yet it was after
nightfall that we sometimes played my favorite game: “hide and go seek.” If
you’ve ever played it, you remember the simple rules. One person looks while
all the other’s hide and when opportunity provides, those who are hiding race
to the home base before being tagged. It was exciting for me to hide and try to
avoid capture. I never minded the minutes lying still behind a row of hedges or
standing motionless behind a tree waiting for the moment to race home, and in my
neighborhoods version of the game, shout “free” meaning you had won the round.
For King David, hiding was not a game; it was a spiritual necessity. In the
Psalms David often expressed the desire to hide, not from, but in God. Here are a
few of his thoughts and appeals for God to hide him:
“You are my hiding place; You preserve me from trouble . . .” Psalm 119:114
“You are my hiding place and my shield; I wait for Your word.” Psalm 17:8
“Hide me in the shadow of Your wings” Psalm 27:5
“Rescue me from my enemies, Lord, for I hide myself in you.” Psalm 143:9
Do you sense the common theme of David’s prayer to God to be hidden?
In Him, there is protection. In Him there is peace. In the often desperate and
dangerous world that David lived in, like our own, it is no wonder he often cried to
God to hide him and rejoiced in that in the midst of trouble, the Lord was a place
of strength and protection. Praise God, He still is! Like the Shepherd King, we too
can rejoice to be hidden in Him; but there’s more to the biblical theme of hiding
than the blessings of protection.
Perhaps the most remarkable passage of hiding in God is not found in the
Old Testament, but in the letter Paul wrote to the Colossians. In the teaching of
the Apostle, hidden in Christ is more than protection; it is a metaphorical image
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