God on the Go: Gratitude Hide and Seek

Gratitude is so important in our everyday life. We’re going to use the idea of Hide and Seek this week to dig deeper into it. We’ll discover how sometimes the things we should be most grateful for are hiding in plain sight. Finding things to be grateful for on a regular basis will help you live a life filled with gratitude.

What’s New!

Monday Bible Story:

• We can usually find something to be grateful for when we know how to look.

Tuesday Key Verse:

• Colossians 3:17 – “And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”

Wednesday Prayer:

• God, thank you for the big things and the small things there are in my life to be grateful for. Help me to always be looking for things that I can say thank you for. Help me when I sometimes forget to look. In the name of Jesus, amen.

Thursday Question:

• What is something that you have had a hard time finding? Was it your pencil, a homework paper, your bike lock? How did you feel when you found it?

Friday Fun Fact:

• Q: How long have kids been playing hide and seek?
• A: For almost two thousand years!

 Special thanks to George Fox University for sponsoring the God on the Go Podcast!

Show Notes:

To get this week’s episode and daily text prompts, text the word Go to 89419.
If you are in Canada, text GodOntheGo to 866-729-1065

Transcription:

The hot sun would begin dipping down behind the mountains, the temperature would start to cool off and my brothers and I knew it was time. I’m Julie Carr and this has God on the go where we help you make the minutes matter.

All the kids who lived on our block and the next one over would start gathering in our neighbors, the Vandiver’s, in their yard because it was time to play the most epic round of hide and seek ever. I grew up outside of Los Angeles in a town up in the high desert in a valley ringed with mountains. The summer days were super hot, but as soon as the sun started setting, the night air would have a welcome chill to it. While it was too hot to play outside during the day, the evening was when we’d make up for lost time during our summer vacations from school. And maybe I’m remembering this wrong, but it felt like we played hide and seek practically every night of summer vacation.

Now the game of hide and seek has been around for a long time. People back in Greece, in the country of Greece, they were writing about hide and seek back almost 2000 years ago, and there’s actually a painting on a wall in Italy that shows kids playing hide and seek from that same time. Now, I’m not 2000 years old, but when I was a kid, there were tons of other kids who lived in our neighborhood and we loved to play. I don’t remember how our tradition of playing hide and seek started. I don’t know how the schedule was put together so that we all just knew to huddle up a couple of hours before our bedtimes, but somehow we just knew. We’d circle up in the Vandiver’s yard. Someone would be chosen to be it the person who would have to look for everyone, we’d make sure that person covered their eyes and counted to 100 and then we’d scatter, looking for a great place to hide in the four neighbor’s yards we had mapped out as our hide and seek zone.

As soon as the person who was it for the night finished their count, they’d start looking for everyone. If you got found, then you would help join the search for the other kids who were still hiding. Sometimes I’d find a pretty good hiding spot and it would take the person who was it quite a while to find me. Other times they’d find me right away, but every now and then I’d be hiding so well that by the time the streetlights were coming on and the evening had gone truly dark, I’d still be huddled in my hidey hole ready to win the game. I’d love to tell you that I was the best at playing hide and seek, but actually there were a couple of other kids in our group who were truly amazing. And a couple of times they hid so well that we all got worried. Sometimes we even had to get a parent to come out and yell for their child to stop hiding that it was time to get home already. There was nothing like the thrill of hiding and even better was when you were it and you were able to find someone who thought you couldn’t figure out where they were.

That’s what I want to have you do today because we are about to play a game of gratitude Hide and Seek and your it! Like we’ve talked about before, gratitude is when you really take some time to appreciate, to think about how much you value what someone has done for you or for a situation in your life. But what do you do when it’s been a while since you’ve thought about gratitude? What do you do when there’s not a whole lot going on in your life and it’s a little bit like playing hide and seek, trying to find something to be grateful for.

When I was playing hide and seek when I was a kid, like I was telling you about, sometimes the kids who were the hardest to find were the ones who were hiding in plain sight. I’d get so busy looking in all kinds of complicated places that I would sometimes miss the kid who was right in front of me, holding still leaned up against a tree.

Finding things to be grateful for can be a lot like that. A lot of times there are all kinds of things in plain sight that we can miss because we’re looking for big stuff to be grateful for, or we’re waiting for answers to big prayers, instead of noticing what’s right in front of us. Colossians 3:17 says,

And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

This says to me that whatever you’re doing, whether it’s knocking out a chore your mom and dad gave you, or you’re running a drill at practice, or you’re finishing up studying that spelling test list, give thanks for it. It’s something to be grateful for right there in the middle of your average day. Is it great to find the big stuff to give gratitude for? Sure. But we can also be on the lookout for things that might not be as obvious. Clean water to drink, a sunny day, your warm blanket on your bed… All of these things are things to be grateful for too. So today, I want you to play hide and seek. Your it, and for the next few minutes, right there in the car or around the table with your family, as fast as you can, find a few things to be grateful for. They can be small things, maybe even things that sound a little silly, but when it comes to gratitude, to being thankful, small things are big things,. Small things are important, and a whole bunch of small, sincere thank yous lead up to a big life lived in gratitude.

God on the Go is sponsored by George Fox University, where each student will be known personally, academically and spiritually. I’ll see you next week.