You are a hiding place for me; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with shouts of deliverance…. Psalm 32:7 (ESV)
The sign next to the jellyfish tank in the large aquarium stopped me before I could focus on the fascinating creatures. “In a world without hiding places, jellies protect themselves by blending in.” Sometimes it feels like we’re in a world without hiding places. Our pain can’t escape notice. Our failures are paraded on the news or social media. Our mistakes are visible. Our need for solitude is met with a thousand opposing forces.
Because of that truth, many try to protect themselves by blending in. A friend of mine was viciously attacked in a school locker room as a young child. In high school, the thought of a locker room made her physically ill. Rather than explain the reasons for her extreme discomfort, she stayed silent but skipped school every day when gym class was scheduled. All through high school. She barely graduated.
The locker room offered her no place to hide. But she couldn’t blend in either. Jesus doesn’t want us to camouflage our pain. Or skip life because it’s hard. He’s the Shelter we run to. But within the shelter of His embrace is an equipping station where we draw strength to survive out there in the exposure of the often unkind world.
He is our Hiding Place. If we stay close enough to Him, we are provided a cloak of invisibility that protects us from being vulnerable to attack. Jellyfish blend into the world around them. We blend into Jesus.
FAITH STEP: Do you own a fish tank? Or did you as a child? Remember having to work hard to find where the well-camouflaged fish were hiding, though they were in plain view? Consider yourself protected by the holiest of Hiding Places today.
