hiding – Waite for it…

We had five of our grandchildren at our house for Easter Sunday supper and of course, an Easter egg hunt. I can just throw a bunch out on the lawn to keep the younger ones (two and fours) busy. The oldest is almost eight, and I had to level up my egg-hiding to challenge him.

This one loves to climb, so I used some tape to put one of his up high on the play fort. I’m not sure his mom was real happy about the altitude, but once he spotted it, he got up there with no problem.

A little more tape held some eggs underneath the deck of the play fort, just out of plain sight.

He quickly saw the one hanging from a tree with a pine needle pinched between egg halves hanging from an old bird-feeder hook.

The ones that stumped him? One was under an upside-down flower pot. Not hugely creative, but worked. The other was on the ground, under a pile of pine cones, with just the slightest hint of blue showing. I had to give him a couple of clues for these last two. Grandpa is still just a little cleverer than he is!

On our way home from a day at the Dead Sea, we had the chance to stop at En Gedi, a place of springs and caves where David hid while running away from King Saul. Saul was so jealous of David’s popularity that he tried several time to kill him. David found refuge in this place where only ibex usually leapt up and down the cliffs.

After visiting so many places of Jesus’ ministry that had been built over with churches, shrines, traditions and souvenir shops, my wife and I found this place to be quite different. Looking up at the caves on the nearly vertical cliffs, she said, “This seems like the real thing.” There was nothing artificial or modern about this oasis. We could imagine just hard it would have been to look for and find David and his army in a place like this. Standing beneath the waterfall, I could imagine just how refreshing it must have been to find a place like this out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but the starkest wilderness.

Where would you go if you had to run for your life? Where would you hide if you didn’t want to be found? Would it even be possible in our time to be off the grid like David?