On Hiding in Our Suffering:

When it comes to suffering, I’ve done a LOT of hiding in my life.  More than anyone can imagine.  I’m learning to be more open about suffering. Sometimes this openness feels wildly open, if I’m honest.  It has been uncomfortable to come out of hiding.  However, when I hid, it wasn’t necessarily voluntary.  I was paralyzed: I couldn’t physically bring myself to share difficult experiences.  I also didn’t always know I was hiding.  It just happened.  So often, it wasn’t a conscious choice.  

 

When I hide in my suffering, I try to suppress the truth of the suffering.  It’s my attempt to subvert tough realities.  My hiding in suffering is also very much about shame, this feeling of falling short, not being enough, and not being worth protection and care.  I want to be covered, so I hide.  

 

I’ve found there’s a high cost to hiding.  Hiding diminishes my ability to build deep, meaningful relationships.  Hiding means I don’t trust.  Hiding means being in constant protection mode, and I’m always pretending to be ok.  However, there’s also a cost to being open.  I might not be believed (and that will do a number on reality as well).  I might be rejected. I might be judged.  It’s taken a lot for me to come out of hiding in my suffering.  

 

 

I Hide because Suffering is Complex:

It can be difficult to speak to, or understand suffering, because no one suffers all the same things, and no one suffers all the same ways.  We can assume we understand someone else’s suffering, because of our own suffering, but life is just not that simple.  The sheer complexity of suffering can result in hiding our suffering.  It’s painful to talk about suffering when it feels like no one understands, and everyone is judging based on how our closest friends and family have responded to us.

 

 

I Hide because Suffering is Frightening:

For sufferers, it can be difficult to share our suffering with others, because suffering involves deep waters, that are frightening for ourselves, let alone for our hearers.  It can be difficult to share our suffering with others, because it makes others afraid and uncomfortable.  Many people do not want to believe that life can be that hard, and so in their own fear and insecurity, they can draw the wrong conclusions about our suffering.  Our suffering can threaten their relative peace.  They are desperately attempting to establish for themselves that this kind of suffering couldn’t possibly touch their lives.  When our attempts to share our suffering gets rebuked or misunderstood to preserve someone else’s illusion of safety, even at the more surface levels, we learn we must hide our suffering.

 

 

I Hide because Suffering is Dangerous and Paralysing:

On the other hand, sufferers can be so shell-shocked, they never let anyone in to see their suffering.  We are hurting so deeply, we have no way to figure out how to entrust that complex suffering with anyone.  Or, we might have even buried our pain so deeply, we don’t even know that we carry it – our bodies and minds have sought to erase the pain.  Or, we are drowning in so much shame about what we suffer, the shame paralyzes us, and we cannot share.  Paralysis, indeed, is normal, for many reasons in suffering.  And for many of us, we might want to share, but have no idea how to put our suffering into words.  Some suffering is indescribable.

 

I encounter people who are hurting deeply all the time, but they have hidden their hurt from most people.  They don’t know where to begin to expose it or seek to deal with it.  Sometimes, when they try to expose their suffering, they can unravel in terrifying ways.  Exposure of suffering can feel dangerous (and in many cases, might in fact be very dangerous for the psyche, and even the body).  Some people suffer such severe horror, their bodies physically shut down (kidneys, inability to eat or speak, etc), and this can be physically life threatening (look up catotonia – those who suffer this need to be hospitalized). Others suffer such severe horror that when they open themselves up to others and face that horror, they become suicidal.  Others suffer such severe horror, their bodies and minds are plagued with PTSD to varying degrees. My life has brushed up against many who suffer this severely.   

 

 

Is it ok to hide?

I know a lot of people who hide.  I know people who have shared their immense load of hurt with only 1 or 2 people in their whole lifetimes.  

 

Should hiding be condemned?  Honestly, anyone who suffers will understand the inclination to hide from that which is painful, grievous and even horrifying.  Hiding is a natural reaction.  It is a human reaction.  It should not be condemned.  

 

However, how we hide in our suffering can sadly increase our troubles.  Our relationships can struggle (or be non-existent).  Our self-talk can be toxic and deeply unhelpful.  Our bodies can hold onto the stress, making us sick.  We can be living perpetually with false shame, or even in a false reality!  

 

 

Listen to God’s Invitations to Hide from His Word, Gifted to Us in Love:

 

Psalm 27:4-6

“One thing have I asked of the Lord,
that will I seek after:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life,

To gaze upon the beauty of the Lord
and to inquire in his temple.

For he will HIDE me in his shelter
in the day of trouble;
he will CONCEAL me under the COVER of his tent;
he will LIFT me high upon a rock.

And now my head shall be lifted up
above my enemies all around me,
and I will offer in his tent

Sacrifices with shouts of joy;
I will sing and make melody to the Lord.”

When we seek the Lord, He ACTS on our behalf, and He does the hiding for us!  God Himself, will hide us in His shelter, in the day of trouble.  As we dwell in God, we behold His beauty, which re-orients us from all the hideous things we have seen and experienced in this fallen world.  We can hope in God, who WILL deliver us from our enemies (sickness, poverty, abusers, sin, loss, etc).  As we wait on God, He hides us in Himself, and He will show us some measure of goodness in the land of the living (v.13).  

 

Psalm 32:7

“You are a HIDING PLACE for me;

You preserve me from trouble;

You surround me with shouts of deliverance.”

God IS our hiding place.  We are all inclined to hide in our suffering.  God is our HIDING place.  He is the BEST hiding place – the only hiding place that can truly preserve you from trouble.  Our souls are safe in God, and He protects us in Himself.  While we may continue to endure trouble on this side of the sun, God will guard our hearts and souls, in Himself.  He even helps us to endure our troubles with joy, as we see our deliverance at hand, in Him.

 

Psalm 91:1-6

“He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High
will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.
I will say to the Lord, ‘My refuge and my fortress,
my God, in whom I trust.’

 

For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler

And from the deadly pestilence.

He will COVER you with his pinions,

And UNDER his wings you will find REFUGE;

His faithfulness is a shield and buckler.
You will not fear the terror of the night,

Nor the arrow that flies by day,

Nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness,

Nor the destruction that wastes at noonday.”

 

God covers us UNDER His wings.  This beautiful, fatherly protection imagery is one of my favourites.  When danger comes upon us, God brings us so near that He hides us under His very own wings.  We are protected, safe, loved, and comforted in the refuge of God’s care.  

 

Colossians 3:1-4

“If then you have been raised with Christ, 

seek the things that are above,

Where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.
Set your minds on things that are above,

Not on things that are on earth. 

For you have died,

And your life is HIDDEN with Christ in God.

When Christ who is your life appears,

Then you also will appear with him in glory.”

Suffering tends to have us looking at the world around us.  In our fear, we zone in on the cause of our suffering.  Or, in our desperation, we look out into the world for escape.  But God invites us to look higher, to seek Him, in the heavenly places.  As we set our minds on things above, God will remind us that we belong to Him, and our lives our hidden in Christ.  As we wait patiently for Christ’s return, our hearts are strengthened as we hope for that coming day, when we appear with Christ in glory.  All the grief and pain we suffer now will be healed.  We wait with expectation and hope. In agony of body, soul and mind, I have had to persevere in ‘seeking to dwell in the house of the Lord.’

 

My Hiding in God:

In my own suffering, this hiding in God, and waiting for Him has not come easily.  It’s hard to ‘hide in God’ when we cannot tangibly feel God’s wings covering us.  It’s hard to set our minds on things above, when we can’t physically ‘see’ Christ.  I have had to fight, with a multitude of tears, in my years and years of hopelessness, to hope.  My soul has been deeply afflicted, throughout my life, and it has felt like God has been hiding his face from me (Ps 27:8).  But I have had to learn how to keep ‘seeking God’s face’, and trusting God’s Word more than my own anguish.  God IS my hiding place, whether I feel like He is or not.  God IS my hiding place, and that IS my reality.  I cling to this more than I cling to anything else, because He is the one safe place to hide.  When I hide in God, He strengthens and heals me, little by little.

 

 

The Place of Community:

Those who suffer do need others to lovingly care for and counsel them through the dark valleys, and out of the deep mire.  However, I can attest that it can be very difficult to find safe people to invite into our suffering.  Even when seeking professional help, it’s difficult.  I tried a few counselors before finding the right person for my situation (with wisdom to speak into abuse, chronic health issues AND trauma).  I’ve had many well-meaning friends say harmful things that totally unravelled me, in their attempts to comfort me.  It can be incredibly tempting to give up on community, when we’ve been hurt, abandoned or unloved in community.

 

However, as we take that first step of hiding in God, we learn from Him to hope.  We hope that we will see the ‘goodness of the Lord in the land of the living’ in community.  We hope that God, at some point along the road, will bring safer people into our lives.  As we hide in God, we also learn more and more discernment.  We learn to forgive those who willfully harm us, and those who mistakenly hurt us.  We learn that all of us fall short of the glory of God, and thus we learn how to distill the good words from the bad (and we all have good words and bad words that we have shared with others).  

 

 

Why do we need community? 

We need community to help us when we lie to ourselves.  When we have suffered, we can start to believe EVERYTHING is COMPLETELY UNSAFE.  That is not true, and I need loving people in my life to remind me that not everything is COMPLETELY UNSAFE.  Confession: For a while, I believed everyone was sociopathic, because I brushed up too close to one person who was sociopathic.  I needed loving people in my life to assure me that this was not true, and teach me how to return to a healthier framework for seeing the world.  There IS evil in the world, but praise be to God, not everything is evil!  It was very dangerous for me to live in a reality where I believed everyone was sociopathic.  I’m thankful and indebted to those who helped me out of that dark place.  

Other lies we might struggle with in our suffering: 

-we can blame ourselves for our suffering when it’s not our fault (ie child or marital abuse)

-we can adopt very dangerous coping mechanisms (such as addictions)

-we can become hopeless and suicidal

-anger and resentment can poison us, and we can become harmful to others (we see this in the extreme with Incels and terrorists or school shootings, etc)

-and so much more…

 

Community has been very painful for me at times…but it has also been tremendously healing and helpful for my soul.  Especially when I am pointed faithfully to Scripture and to God’s safety.  If you have suffered, I pray earnestly that God will raise up healthy and safe community who can truly help and minister to your souls, rather than harm you further. 

 

 

Conclusion:

I continue to suffer a wide variety of things in this life.  Although I have been in the depths of suffering for a long time now, it has not become natural to hide in God.  My flesh wants to hide in all the other, more dangerous things.  But I only find life in God.  He forgives my iniquities, he heals my diseases (or promises to in the next life), he redeems my life from the pit, he crowns me with steadfast love and mercy, he satisfies me with good so that my youth is renewed like the eagle’s.  He alone can do any of this.  I must continue to seek his face.  Or the pit will consume me.  

I pray that I will continue to learn how to hide in God.  I pray that God will be kind, and provide safe people in my life to help me when I am tempted to despair and am in the depths of confusion.  I pray that God will be the lifter of my head, and of yours.

"As a father shows compassion to his children,

So the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.

For he knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust."

~Psalm 103:13-14