HIDE AND SEEK...

I realize that I'm an old geezer, when hide and seek was a fun game -nowadays, teenagers and 20 somethings would laugh.
I remember playing 'hide and seek' in the late afternoon, and it took me a long time to realize as darkness came, that the game was over and NO ONE had come looking for me. I remember that because I have struggled during my life with the same question that my father struggled - what difference do we make? or do we. One might think that God was playing a game of hide and seek with the troubled people of that day. the King for which they had been searching, the Liberator who would rescue them from their common ordinary pathetic lives, didn't come where or how they thought//but rather in an obscure village of Bethlehem, and then in a Stable.

Young parents might identify the need when a new child arrives, at wanting to shut the doors, keeping relatives, friends, well wishing people at bay and have some time alone. Mary and Joseph might have identified with such feelings, although there was no doors in that manger, and the animals, and riff raff stopped by, and there was no privacy. It was a different world back then, just as it was when I was young. As a minister, I was 'expected' to always be on call, to smile even when I didn't feel like it, to comfort the afflicted, and as some would say afflict the comfortable. The day after Labor Day on the Vineyard, I finally took a day off to go fishing on Chappy, and the police were sent down to seek me out ...there was no privacy.

My father and I used to play this adult game of hide and seek...and when Phyllis died, and I moved down to Melbourne two years later, everyone wanted and needed to know where I was ' are you okay?" Forget about the fact that I was in my 50's, and I didn't know where anyone else was. I realized that having lost everything else in life, including control, i only controlled if I answered the phone or not. Like the Prodigal father that he was, Dad kept calling, and I kept not answering. He would ride his bike 10 miles from where he lived "just passing through the neighborhood." I knew where he was, and that he was there, but I also knew I was protecting THEM from my emotions.and feelings. which ran deep. and the ONLY person who understood those feelings was my father...

Each New Year's Eve when we were young, we wrote a letter to ourselves, putting it on my father's Office Desk and he would lock them away until the next new year's day. We might talk about resolutions, or dreams, or what we thought might or might not happen...I still do that...the last day of 1992, having written my letter while doing my Chaplain's job at the Island' Hospital, I said 'NOTHING NEXT YEAR CAN BE WORSE THAN THIS YEAR." I even mentioned it to Phyllis when I got home, what I had written...we had lost so many Churchmembers and friends that year... Little did I realize that as 1993 dawned, that my life, and that of Heather and Jennifer, would change forever... I already have remembered that in last year's letter, which I shall open on Tuesday I had written that my father would die this year...

As I get older, striving to spare those around me whom I love and cherish, the deep emotions, tears, and feelings which are part of ME, I have isolated myself...and while I hope that they understand, if they don't, then I still have to do it...I wonder if that wasn't part of what God was doing, when they first heard the whimering of a Child????