Hide and Seek

"How much longer will you forget me, Lord?

Forever?

How much longer will you hide yourself from me?"

-Psalm 13:1 (GNT)

I've felt this way.

 Yes. 

I have.

I admit this to a Father who already knows, feeling silly and exposed in a morning prayer.

I do not like to recall, nor do I like talking about it, but the hide and seek game I played with my Salvation is not the end of the story which turns it, twists it, and transforms into beauty, glory. 

Only Christ could take a damaged nothingness like I once lived and make glory abundant.

In my worst starvation, in the time when anorexia was my master, in time when bones were jagged and skin was paper thin and breaths were wavering and heart just about to give out, it seemed lost.

And by "it," I mean me. I was lost. Life, lost. Love, lost. Walking, living in a corpse, spirit dwindling.

    

I cried tears that clouded a dashboard view, all alone driving home from another workout that I was amazed I'd survived without heart failure. Chest pains torching.

I cried weekly in church, hoping no one would see, as make up meant to cover up dark eye circles and dry, pale skin washed away, salty mudslide down my cheeks. 

It must have looked like closeness, but really, it was sinking, drowning.

I just did not think He could save me. 

And therein lies the problem.

There it is.

I just did not believe.

These cries for help were not in faith. 

It seems so elementary, doesn't it? Baby stuff. Things some of us were spoonfed, or repeatedly shoved down the throat, since Vacation Bible School days and parents lectures and sermons galore. 

Faith. Believe. Just have faith. Faith. Just believe.

But believing is the finding and keeping of our Savior. 

The true believing brings miracles. 

The chasing, the exhausting hide and seek game comes to an end and the life you long for, the life you cry for so long for, it becomes yours because it is His and He is yours and you are His and you are kept.  

I remember on this day when I can see His promises are kept and the believing is the dawning of my day as a sunrise of red and violet fills the bedroom with light.

And I pray, I pray that I would not belittle that word ever again.

 Just believe.

 The "just" makes it so simple, but no, the just is fundamental. Believing is a task, but more. Just believe-- make it the heart and the soul and the fundamental of the life lived for Christ.