Hidden Is Not the Same as Hiding

The coat goes over the back of the chair, not on the hook by the door, and it has gone there every Thursday for two and a half years.

Nobody has ever noticed. Why would they. Forty-one people in a village hall with a hired piano and a conductor who taps a music stand with a pencil, and the altos are on the left and the sopranos are on the right and the tea break is at ten to nine. She sings the alto line. She is good at it. She loves the bit in the second piece where the whole hall goes quiet before the last phrase and then all forty-one of them come in together, and for four seconds she is not a woman with a thing, she is a note inside a chord.

Then the pencil taps. Tea break. And she is up and out with the coat already in her hand, because a tea break is twelve minutes of people standing about in twos and threes with mugs, and twelve minutes is long enough for somebody to ask her something ordinary, and ordinary questions have a way of walking toward the thing without meaning to.

She is home by five past nine. She always is. She has told herself for two and a half years that she just does not like the tea.

And you know the coat, because you have your own version of it. Maybe yours is a seat near a door, or a phone you take out at a particular moment, or a job you volunteer for that happens to be in the next room. You have got an exit built into an ordinary evening, and you built it well, and the tiring thing is not even the thing itself. The tiring thing is the arithmetic.

Hidden is a place, not a behavior

I am writing this to the one carrying something nobody knows about, and I am not going to guess at it, name it, or hand you a list to pick from. It is not mine and it never will be. What is mine to say is what happens to a person who has been running the arithmetic for two and a half years, or twenty.

The arithmetic goes like this. Who is here. How long until somebody asks. What is the ordinary answer that closes the subject. Where is the door. When can I go without it looking like going. And it runs all evening, underneath the alto line, underneath the laughter, so that a person can be in a beautiful room full of kind people and be exhausted by nine o'clock in a way nobody else in that hall has any idea about. Not the thing. The arithmetic about the thing.

You are at rest in that room tonight, right in the middle of it, with the thing still unspoken and nothing at all required of your mouth. Scripture puts your safety somewhere no conversation can reach: it says you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a lived fact instead of a nice line. Hidden. Not covered up. Hidden.

Hear the difference, because your whole evening turns on it. Hiding is something a frightened person does, and it costs energy every second it is happening. Hidden is something that is done to a treasure by someone who loves it. A hidden thing is not running. A hidden thing is kept.

For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.Colossians 3:3

You have been placed, deliberately, inside the safest keeping in the universe, and you were put there rather than putting yourself there. That is the written word's own picture and not my encouragement, and the Spirit of God carries it into the exact place in you that goes tight at ten to nine. Christ is the covering, and He does not slip.

Being known is not being found out

Now the second half, and this is the one that lets a person stay in a room.

Somewhere in you there is a suspicion that has never quite been said out loud, even privately: that if God really sees the whole of it, then the day is coming when it gets brought out. That His knowing is the first half of an exposure. That He is holding the file.

He is not holding a file. He has known the whole of it since before you did, in complete detail, and He has not moved one inch away from you in all that time. Read that slowly. Not moved. He was not surprised the day you found out what you were carrying, and He has been near every Thursday since, including the ones you left at five past nine.

You are known all the way down and you are not exposed, and those two are not the same country. The word says nothing in all creation is hidden from His sight, and it says in the same breath that we come to His throne with boldness, which is an astonishing pairing until you notice the Holy Spirit is the one who put the two of them together in the same book. The One who sees everything is the One inviting you in.

So what is there to do, tonight, with an actual mouth in an actual room? Something small, and it is not the telling.

There is a sentence you can say to God about yourself that has nothing in it about the thing at all. Something like: I am safe here. Four words. Heaven has never required a long speech, or an eloquent one, or a complete disclosure attached to it. What Jesus taught about the mountain was that the smallest live faith you have got, said out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. The mountain here is not your secret. The mountain is the arithmetic. And you are allowed to speak to it.

You have real authority to say a true thing over your own evening, and it works because of whose you are and not because of how much you have disclosed. That authority comes down from Scripture, not up from your confidence, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying the words wherever He carries them.

And if what you are carrying tonight has gone past heaviness into thinking about not being here at all, please tell a living person today, without ever having to tell them the thing itself. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you are. You can reach for help and keep your privacy in the same hand. That is not a step backwards from anything God is doing. It is part of it.