When I was younger, I loved cookies. It was my goal to eat as many cookies as possible. My mom, being worried about both my health and my hyperactivity, would limit the amount of cookies we could have. My mom was very active. Many times she would be sewing in the other room, and I just knew that I had found my chance. I would sneak into the other room and go to grab a cookie. Invariably, just as I opened the cookie jar lid, my mother would yell, “JOSH, get out of the cookie jar.” This always amazed me. Obviously not familiar with the concept of sound traveling, I could not believe that my mom knew what I was doing while she was in another room.

I was trying to be decietful in order to get what I wanted. I would never (well, maybe not NEVER) walk brazenly in there to grab a cookie while my mother was looking directly at me. So I tried to disobey her without her knowledge. Many times we try to sneak our disobedience past people. We are willing to speed, unless we see a police car. We have a secret life, that no one else knows about. The biggest scandals are those who we thought were righteous turning out to be very unrighteous. Sadly, because we can hide aspects of our lives from others, we feel we can hide it from God as well.

The problem is that God knows all that we do. Every action, every thought is before Him. I thought I was being clever when I tried to steal a cookie, yet my attempts were laughable. Our efforts to hide our lives from God are equally clumsy. No matter how dark it is, or to what depths or heights we go, God is there. It is important for us to keep that in mind. We can many times catch ourselves doing things that would be embarassed if somebody walked in in the middle of it. Yet what we forget is that God is always there. We need to behave always as if we are in the presence of God. Because we are.