Hide and Seek

Last night was Wednesday and Wednesday night is Time Out night! Two groups last night meant it was a little chaotic especially with some of the S2’s more concerned with painting each other rather than the wallpaper which was provided!

We started however with the 10-12’s, who after being amazingly gifted at ‘Schebang Schebang’ and the ‘The Gargle guessing game’ (which should incidentally be renamed ‘Gargle, giggle and Spit’), retired for some serious thoughts on worship, what it means, and who deserves it.

Now I am not usually the biggest lover of paraphrases in the world, but last night I took a little exception. When reading The Message, Acts 17 has a great bit in it which talks about how good God is,

‘Starting from scratch, he made the entire human race and made the earth hospitable, with plenty of time and space for living so we could seek after God, and not just grope around in the dark but actually find him. He doesn't play hide-and-seek with us. He's not remote; he's near. We live and move in him, can't get away from him!’

When we started talking about who or what really, deserves our worship, we realised that God being perfect, being the creator of each of us, and being the creator of the earth in all its goodness (even though humanity has done its best to mess it up), pretty much deserves our worship more than anything else that’s out there.

Sometimes however we might find this a little difficult, as even though God doesn’t play hide and seek with us, for some it’s hard to think of having faith or worshipping a God who we cant physically see in front of us. Although at times this is a beautiful part of the mystery of our faith, it can often hold others back. One of our group, lets just call her Miss Em for now, came out with a magnificent illustration that I think helped us all immensely. She reminded us that when you happen to be on MSN talking to someone, all you can really see is the text of what that person is writing coming up on your computer screen, and although you can’t see them you have to trust that its them that you are speaking to. As a Christian we have to do a lot of trusting, in-fact that is what our faith is based on, trust! We need to trust in God and his word, remembering that he doesn’t want to play hide and seek with us, he is near, and wants to have a close and personal relationship with us all.

To finish our time off together and to reiterate the point, we played a massive game of sardines on all fours in the church. If you have never played sardines its like hide and seek but when you find the person hiding you hang about with them until everyone else finds you….much fun was had.