Hidden with Christ

Imagine the most secure vault you can picture, deep underground, thick steel, every wall built to keep one precious thing beyond the reach of any thief or fire or flood. The thing inside is not lost. It is not gone. It is hidden, kept, safe. Now hear what Paul tells the Colossians about the truest thing about you: you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. The upheaval, you know too well, has a way of stripping things off, roles you wore, certainties you leaned on, a reputation, the old confident self you thought was the real you. The storm reached all of it, because all of it was on the surface, exposed to the weather. But the deepest you, your real life, was never out there where the wind could get to it. It was hidden, with Christ, in God, layered safe behind the One the shaking cannot touch. The psalmist sang of the same shelter long before: You are my hiding place; You will preserve me from trouble. There is a particular relief in this discovery, one that comes only on the far side of loss. What matters most about you was secured, all along, in the one place the storm could never reach.

The upheaval stripped away a great deal you assumed was essential to you, the roles, the labels, the confident old self, and it can leave you feeling thinned out, scraped down to less than you were. Here is the relief Paul holds out. Your truest life was never on the exposed surface where the storm does its work. It is hidden with Christ in God. To be hidden here does not mean lost or forgotten; it means kept, the way something irreplaceable is locked in the one vault no thief can crack. Your deepest identity has been secured in Christ, layered behind the very life of God, beyond the reach of anything that shakes the surface of a life. So you may feel diminished, and on the surface perhaps you genuinely are, smaller than you were before the loss. But the deepest you is not diminished. It is safe, kept, hidden in God, and the psalmist says you are even now surrounded with songs of deliverance, sung over the part of you the storm could never get to. What was hidden in God cannot be plundered by what merely scours the surface.