My 4-year old son has recently taken to sneaking things so that he can enjoy whatever seems enjoyable of that particular item before getting caught and having it taken away.
It has become quite frustrating. My husband and I have tried explaining the wrongness of sneaking, hiding, and lying. We have told him many times that if something has to be hidden or performed in secret, then it most certainly is something that he should not be doing at all.
That fact has not yet sunk in for my son, which shouldn’t surprise me, because I think that fact eludes most adults as well. Except we shroud our actions in terms of privacy and personal space and individual rights. The truth, however, is that most of what we do in secret should not be done at all either.
But, the idea of confessing our wrong actions, of bringing into the light whatever we have been keeping in the dark, is quite scary.
For some things, we know exactly what is hidden, which is why we keep it hidden.
For other things, we imagine our secret to be worse than it really is because it has been secreted away for so long. If we were to open the door to that particular closet, we’d realize that what we believed to be a monster is really a mouse. Unfortunately, for most of us, our fear keeps us from ever investigating and we continue to live in fear of our secret monsters.
For all the rest, we stashed them away in the dark a long time ago, and we have allowed ourselves to forget about them. It is as if our mind has erected a barrier that keeps that part of ourselves locked away so we don’t have to deal with it. We look in that direction and all we see is darkness. We have no real idea what is there.
We hide things from others. We hide things from ourselves. We hide things from God. Or, at least, we think we do.
The Bible says of God, “He reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what is in the darkness, and the light dwells with him” (Daniel 2:22, ESV).
He reveals deep and hidden things. Things we have removed from sight, not to be searched out.
He knows what is in the darkness. An inherent knowledge, a revelatory knowledge of our darkest places.
The light dwells with him. Both an illumination and a wisdom that fellowships and abides in him.
A light and a wisdom that abides within every Christian through the in-dwelling of the Holy Spirit.
That means that there is nothing truly hidden, no real secrets, and no impenetrable darkness in which we can keep our actions from being found out. Which is both a dreadful notion and a relief. We dread the judgment, reaction, and mistreatment that could accompany such revelations. Yet, there is also a relief in knowing that these hidden, secret things do not have the degree of power that we currently believe them to have.
Walking out of the oppression that is the darkness in which we hide and secret things away is a difficult process, at best. However, if we can take one thing at a time and first confess it to God, then to ourselves and finally to one other person, then we could truly be free.
If God already knows the worst of ourselves and loves us anyway, and if we can face the worst of ourselves and love ourselves anyway, then perhaps revealing it to someone who also loves us might not be so bad. Perhaps the price of this freedom is worth paying.
“Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed” (James 5:16, KJV).
(Title quote by Andre Malraux.)