“Secret”—The word has a magical ring to it doesn’t it? As children we are fascinated with secrets, but keeping a secret is a difficult thing to do.
My younger brother Rick and I used to buy our mom a Mother’s Day gift or a Christmas gift as a joint project. It was a mixed blessing to involve him in the selection of the gift, however, because it was impossible for him to keep a secret. One time when we went to Jett’s Mercantile in Hornbeck shortly before Mother’s Day, we told our mom that we wanted to get her a Mother’s Day gift. She gave us some money and we went off on our own. We found a nice cookie jar (I wonder if we had ulterior motives in the selection?), and I swore Rick to silence. He faithfully promised me that he would not breathe a word of it to our mother. As soon as we saw her, the first thing that he said was, “Guess what we got you for Mother’s Day—a cookie bag.”
I got so mad at him that I wanted to take some direct physical action against him. My mother calmed the troubled waters by insisting that she had no idea what a cookie bag was and that she couldn’t wait to get it.
“Secrets”—we have a fascination with them. Paul Tournier once wrote a book by that title. In it, he identified three important stages of life which revolve around secrets.
The first stage is the formation of the individual. The child becomes an individual by the creation of secrets. He establishes his own identity by having possession of some things to which his parents are not privy. Parents should not insist on knowing everything. It is only by the creation of this distance through secrets that a child becomes an entity distinct from his parents.
The second stage comes with a special person with whom we fall in love. In this stage we share our deepest secrets. We open the door to our heart and share the most intimate secrets of our life. In the process, we establish the deepest bond in human relationships.
The third stage is to have this experience with God. It is to come to Him in a daring act of trust and to bare our souls to Him.
We fill the rooms of our homes with trophies, awards, and medals, but there is another room. It is the deeply hidden center of our being where we stuff memories too painful to remember.
When we come into the presence of the Heavenly Father, we are like the prodigal son coming home from the far country. Out on that dusty road he opened up the painful secrets of the far country and found his father’s love and acceptance.
Entering into the presence of God is to be a lifelong process. Jesus said, “When you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret” (Matt. 6:6). Tournier writes, “Meditation is the secret and patient waiting for God’s secrets which He may whisper to us in the secret of our heart.” Spend time in the secret place this week!
