Hiding vs. Revealing
Daily Scripture
Psalm 51:1-6, 10-12
1 Have mercy on me, God, according to your faithful love!
Wipe away my wrongdoings according to your great compassion!
2 Wash me completely clean of my guilt;
purify me from my sin!
3 Because I know my wrongdoings,
my sin is always right in front of me.
4 I’ve sinned against you—you alone.
I’ve committed evil in your sight.
That’s why you are justified when you render your verdict,
completely correct when you issue your judgment.
5 Yes, I was born in guilt, in sin,
from the moment my mother conceived me.
6 And yes, you want truth in the most hidden places;
you teach me wisdom in the most secret space.
10 Create a clean heart for me, God;
put a new, faithful spirit deep inside me!
11 Please don’t throw me out of your presence;
please don’t take your holy spirit away from me.
12 Return the joy of your salvation to me
and sustain me with a willing spirit.
Daily Reflection & Prayer
Note: This week’s GPS draws on lyrics from two of the most popular songs from Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters, “Golden” and “What It Sounds Like”.
Song Lyrics:
I was a ghost, I was alone
Given the throne, I didn’t know how to believe
I was the queen that I’m meant to be
I lived two lives, tried to play both sides
But I couldn’t find my own place*
Most of us are running two versions of ourselves at once: the one we let people see, and the one we keep “off camera”, the doubts, the mistakes, the parts we’re not sure we believe yet. Managing that gap is exhausting, even when we’ve stopped noticing we’re doing it. The song lyrics open with exactly that confession, an admission that she’s played both sides so long that she’s lost track of which one is real. Psalm 51 comes from a man who knew that exhaustion firsthand. David didn’t ask God to better manage his image, ; he asked God to create something new in the parts of him nobody else could see.
- What version of myself do I let people see most easily, and which one am I quietly keeping “off camera?”
- David didn’t ask God to fix what people could see. He asked for truth in the parts nobody else could reach, then for an entirely new heart underneath it. Where am I managing my image instead of just letting myself be known?
Prayer
Gracious God, you see every version of me, the one I present and the one I protect. Create in me a clean heart today so I can rest in being fully known. Amen.
GPS Insights
Mindy LaHood
Someone told me once that I have a work voice and a real voice, and that the two are not even close. I laughed when they said it. Then I spent an embarrassing amount of time afterward realizing how right they were.
I am one person showing up in a lot of different rooms, and each room seems to want a slightly different version of me. Confident and three steps ahead at work. Softer with my family. Something looser and more unfiltered with the two or three friends who get the real thing, and even that shifts depending on how the week has gone. None of this is dishonest, exactly. It is closer to just being a whole person trying to move through a whole life without dropping anything.
What actually trips me up is not the switching. It is forgetting, somewhere between one room and the next, that something is supposed to hold steady underneath all of it, no matter which version happens to be standing at the front of the room that day.
That steady thing is who I am in Christ. Not the work voice, not the exhausted voice, not the voice I use when I am trying very hard to look like I have it together. Being a child of God does not improve on my best days or erode on my worst ones. I can walk into a meeting fully capable and, underneath that, still be someone who does not have a single thing figured out, and both of those are true at once, which took me an unreasonably long time to actually believe.
Believing that has not made me stay the same, which was not really the arrangement I thought I was signing up for. I assumed being fully loved as I am meant I got to stay exactly as I am, forever, no notes. God apparently had other plans, patient ones, on a timeline I cannot see the edges of, slowly shaping me into someone more like him, whether I have fully signed off on the process or not. Loved completely today. Still under construction. Both, somehow, in the same breath, without the contradiction I kept bracing for.
Taylor Swift has everyone calling this having an era now, and I have decided I like the phrase more than I expected to, mostly because it lets me off the hook a little. It gives me permission to admit that whoever I was five years ago and whoever is typing this sentence are not going to match, and that this is allowed, and that I do not have to release a deluxe edition explaining myself.
Psalm 51 asks for something I do not ask for nearly often enough: truth in the hidden places, wisdom in the secret ones, not a better performance of whichever version of me happens to be on stage that day. Then it asks for an actual clean heart, not a fresh coat of paint on the current one. A new heart, made by someone who is not me, because my track record at making myself new is, frankly, not great.
Hiding looks like propping up every version of myself through sheer effort and a great deal of comparison, checking my current chapter against somebody else’s highlight reel and coming up short nearly every time I do it. Revealing looks like remembering that Christ is the one constant thread stitched through every version I have ever been and letting him keep doing the stitching instead of trying to finish the pattern myself.
May you remember today that you do not have to defend one version of yourself as the only real one, not the confident one from the meeting, not the tired one who let her guard down in the car afterward, not the one who has cried over something she could not fully explain to anyone, including herself. Every version has been real. Every one of them has been afraid, at some point, of not being enough, and every one of them has been loved anyway, completely, by a God who has never once changed his mind about you, not on your best day and not on the day you are barely holding it together. Go in peace, knowing that whatever comes next is already being written by the one who was faithful in everything that came before it, who was never waiting for you to arrive somewhere better before he decided you were worth loving.
