Playing Hide & Seek

“Find me, Mama,” demands the petite heap of blankets every morning. Cooperatively I search the room . . . “Is my little girl in the closet? behind the chair? under the crib?” I rattle drawers and rustle curtains, culminating in a “find” full of kisses and giggles. Often I must repeat the process, and more than once I’ve mortally offended my son (our eldest Hide & Seek aficionado) by locating him too quickly. “You cheated!” he accuses, and we must prolong the game until my children’s passion to be found is satiated.

Why do they do this? And it doesn’t stop when we get older.

Here’s a favorite line from a favorite movie, Parent Trap (1994), when Natasha Richardson and Dennis Quaid’s characters try to make sense of their break-up a decade ago:

He: “Why did you leave?”
She: “Why didn’t you come after me?”
He: “I didn’t know you wanted me to.”

Every time we watch this, I snuggle closer to Mitch, get teary-eyed, and say “ALWAYS come after me.”

Mitch mastered this game early. In the four long years I gathered courage for the greatest leap of my life, trepidations began to crumble and a final fear surfaced: “What if you ever left me?”

“Then I would try to talk you into staying,” he replied simply, with complete logic. That’s how I knew he had found me and wouldn’t let go.

Hide and Seek.

Sometimes we seek by hiding.

Like the old saying goes, “he chased her until she caught him.”

In “Kate & Leopold,” Kate’s brother strategizes his pursuit:
“If I call and leave a message on her answering machine when I know she’s out, then the ball will be in her court.”
And Leopold responds,
“Ah, but you want the ball to be in your court.”

After all, if both players hide, you’ve got no game.

Did you ever hide and no one came to look for you? The big kids ran off to fry bigger fish, leaving you cramped in a small dark place smelling dirty socks and the dawning realization that you had been left seekerless.

Dr. Dobson addresses this devastation in the arena of adult relationships in “Love Must Be Tough” and “Tough Love for Singles” - if your game is off, it’s time for a little coaching.

Do you believe we should be “seeker-friendly”? What if no seekers come and we hide unsought? Did we leave voicemail for the people who stay home on Sunday mornings, and wonder why they don’t call back? Perhaps we should have kept the ball in our court.

Pastor Mark Beeson of Granger Community Church did not spend big bucks to rent a billboard shouting “For the next five weeks, our church will host a solid Scriptural sermon series exhorting you to stop indulging in adultery, lust and pornography.” He would have been lonely in his pulpit that Sunday for sure.

Instead, the billboard, with its four bare feet and four bare words, whispered,

“We’re hiding . . . and the Spirit and the Bride say Come! Find us!
Whoever is thirsty, come on, ‘cuz we’ve got water here!”

And they hosted the feeding of the seven thousand.

Another great game of Hide ‘n Seek.