Playing Hide and Seek with God

“So I said, ‘here I am.’” Psalm 40:8

Childhood memories are strange and powerful things.

Visiting with a woman in hospice care earlier this year, she could vividly recollect ice skating across Fairgrounds Park’s frozen lake in North St. Louis in the 1920s, even though she couldn’t tell me what she had for lunch an hour before I arrived. Perhaps sometimes God gives us just the memories we need, those that bring a little peace and joy.

Before my grandmother died, she didn’t always recognize me or sometimes would get me confused with her long-dead brother. But she could sing every word of “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” always one of her favorites.

My own childhood memories center around our family home in the North Pointe neighborhood of North St. Louis, a handsome collection of mostly small, brick homes nestled in the narrow upper reaches of the city near its border with the county and the Mississippi River. My memories from those times are vivid when I stop to really recall them, although cloudy and worn when I just take a cursory glance.

I can remember the voices of my friends and me at play in the alley behind my house or in the nearby field that skirted the railroad tracks, both just barely wide enough for pickup games of Indian Ball or football. I can remember both the smell of my mother’s oven-baked chicken and the musty, oily odor of our dirt-floored garage. And I remember all the good places to hide when we played hide and seek.

I was good at Indian Ball and football, but not so great at hide and seek. Truth be told, I didn’t like being alone in dark places, waiting for someone to find me. Or maybe NOT find me. That was the problem, I guess. I am a person who likes to be found.

That is what perhaps drove me to seek and find God, even as a child, and so it is even today. (Although I certainly have spent my share of time during my life playing that futile game of hiding from God, like most of us have at one time or another.)

And for just this reason, this short prayer from Psalm 40 (“Here I Am”) is one of the most powerful prayers I know. In those three little words I mutter my belief in God’s existence and let him know I’m here, waiting to hear his voice and somehow respond to his call.

I have felt God’s presence and power many times during my life. I have felt it during those “high holy days” when God seems closest, such as my wedding and the birth of my children. I have felt that power surge through me while hiking amid the red rocks of Arizona and while listening to a majestic piece of music in a massive and ornate symphony hall. I have felt it in the quiet of a Sunday morning when I finally find some time to pray and write.

But I have also felt the seeming utter absence of God’s power as I have watched loved ones die or struggled with my own health challenges. This faith and God stuff isn’t easy. Faith doesn’t mean we will always be able to find God in our lives.

But faith does mean that we will somehow find the strength – even in the midst of our greatest weaknesses – to shout: “Here I am, God. But where are you?” That cry to the heavens, even if it seems to be made in a moment of little faith, is actually a moment of great belief that God is present and listening.

The simple prayer of “Here I am” acknowledges both the speaker and the spoken to, like a child hiding in a secret place, alone and afraid that perhaps the game is over and everyone else has gone home. And so, like children content and confident that we are being cared for and watched over, we cry out: “Here I am, Lord. See me. Find me. Use me.”