Passion · Week 1 · Thursday

Come Out of Hiding

He stopped praying the same week he did the thing he still cannot say out loud.

He is twenty, first year out of the house, and he did not decide to walk away from God. There was no argument and no deconstruction. He just went quiet. He stopped praying, stopped opening anything, and started finding reasons not to be around the people most likely to ask him a real question. He still comes at Christmas and sits toward the back. The shame did exactly what shame is engineered to do. It made him hide. And the hiding made the shame heavier, which made him hide further, and that loop can run for decades if nobody interrupts it.

There is a woman in her fifties running the identical loop from the opposite direction. She prayed hard for a year over a diagnosis in her family and got the other answer. She never got angry at God out loud, because that felt like something she was not allowed to be. She simply got quiet. The quiet is going on two years now, and she feels guilty about the quiet, and the guilt keeps her quiet.

Two different wounds. One identical behavior.

The Oldest Instinct We Have

This is not a modern problem, and it is not a weak-faith problem. It is the first thing human beings ever did when something went wrong between us and God, and it happened in a setting worth noticing. The relationship being described right before this moment is stunningly close.

God walking in the garden in the cool of the day is not the language of a distant deity. That is the language of a standing appointment, an ordinary evening with someone who came around regularly. And the instant something broke, the very first human instinct was not to confess and not to argue. It was to get behind a tree.

Then comes the part that should reset how we picture God on our worst day.

Not what did you do. Not how could you. Not do you have any idea what this is going to cost. Where are you. He already knew the answer to that question and to every other question He could have asked. He came looking anyway, and He led with the relational one.

Afraid, and Therefore Hidden

The man’s own explanation is the clearest description of this trap in the Bible, and it comes in a specific order.

Heard, afraid, hid. The Hebrew verb behind afraid is yare, a word with a genuinely wide range. It covers being frightened, and it also covers awe and reverence, standing before something far larger than yourself. That range is the whole tragedy in miniature. The same nearness that used to be the best part of his day had become the thing he most needed to escape. Nothing about God had changed. Everything about how the man could bear to be seen had.

That is worth naming plainly for anyone reading this while hiding. Our fear is not evidence that God has turned. It is evidence that we cannot currently stand to be looked at.

What the Enemy Is Actually After

There is a strategy underneath all of this and it is not subtle once you see it. The goal is never simply to get us to do the wrong thing. The goal is to get us to define ourselves by the wrong thing we did. Not that is what I did, which is a fact a person can bring into the light and be finished with, but that is who I am, which is an identity, and no one confesses an identity. They just manage it quietly forever.

Our culture is remarkably unhelpful here, and it fails in both directions at once. One half tells us that nothing is really wrong, that guilt is only an outdated social construct we should talk ourselves out of, which never actually removes the weight and only removes the vocabulary for carrying it anywhere. The other half, including some of the religious half, is happy to agree that we are exactly as bad as we suspect and to leave us there. Scripture does something neither of them can do. It takes the guilt completely seriously and then takes it away.

How We Process It Determines Whether the Fire Survives

This is the hinge for a passionate life, and it is bigger than it looks. Everyone reading this will do things that make them feel guilty, and everyone will get an answer to prayer that they did not want. Those are not hypotheticals; they are scheduled. What determines whether our fire survives them is not whether they happen. It is what we do in the ninety seconds after they happen. We can hide, cover, go quiet, and manage it, or we can drag it into the light in front of a God who already knew and came looking anyway.

This is also exactly where joy is either lost or found, and joy here is not cheerfulness. Joy is the power to endure adversity, filled with hope. A person hiding from God has no access to that power, not because it was withdrawn from them, but because they are behind a tree and it is being offered out in the open.

Whatever we are covering has already been seen. He came looking anyway, and He is still calling out the same question He asked first.

Burn long, not just bright.

Tomorrow · Embers Apart Go Out