No hidden secrets

Not long ago I was visiting someone in hospital.  We had chatted for a while, and had shared a prayer.  Just as I was about to leave the hospital ward, two nurses approached the bed.  The patient I was visiting commented, “They have come to weigh me.”  My instant reaction was to say, jokingly (knowing that some people are a little secretive about their weight), “I’ll stay and watch!”

Sue and I are in 36^th year of our marriage.  On the whole we are fairly open with each other and don’t tend to keep secrets.  There is one area of Sue’s life, however, which I have never been able to enter, and that is the area of her weight.  On the few occasions when, over the years, I have walked into the bathroom to find Sue on the scales, a look of horror has spread across her face and she has jumped off before I had the opportunity to peek at the reading!  Of course I understand that traditionally there are certain areas of a lady’s life about which it is not polite to enquire (age, weight etc.)  I do know how old Sue is, but I find it funny that she is so secretive about her weight (after all, she looks fine to me!)

 Perhaps all of us have some secrets which we try to keep hidden, even from those nearest and dearest to us.  Yet there is One from whom we can hide nothing.  One of the communion prayers on the Methodist Worship Book begins, “Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden…”  God knows absolutely everything about us, even things which we may have forgotten, and certainly those things we might prefer that he didn’t know!

In some ways we may wish it wasn’t so, but I believe that the fact that God knows everything about us can be a liberating truth.  When we struggle to keep a secret, and have an area of our life which we hide away from our dearest friends, it can have a negative effect on us and act as a hindrance to our friendships and relationships.  How wonderful it is that God knows all about us, our failings, our ‘guilty secrets’, and yet he loves us just the same.  God knows the very worst about us and yet still loved us enough to send Jesus to die on a cross for us.

Someone once said that a true friend is someone who knows all about us but loves us just the same.  That’s how God is!  Our whole lives are open to him.  We can share with him our deepest thoughts and emotions, our hopes and anxieties, our successes and our failures, knowing that nothing will stop him from loving us and wanting the very best for us.