My mother said that to us many times, and although I may not have recognized it as Scripture—it is, and it's found in Numbers 32:23—I certainly believed it. I knew from experience that was how things worked! God seems to have blessed mothers with extra-sensory perception, extensive peripheral vision (maybe even eyes in the back of their heads), keen olfactory detection, and the hearing of a songbird. They just know things!
As a child, I read a story that proved to me without question that wrongdoing cannot be hidden. Now I never hear this Scripture quoted without thinking of that little story that went something like this:
Jimmy's mother was getting ready to bake; she covered a bowl of dough and put it on the back of the stove to rise while she did some other household chores. "Don't touch this bread dough," she told her young son. "Don't even lift the towel and look."
Jimmy couldn't help but be curious. Just what was so important about that bowl of stuff that he couldn't even look? But Mommy had said not to. He left the kitchen and played in the next room for awhile, but then he came back to the kitchen. "I sure would like to look," he thought. But Mommy had said not to. He went away again, but pretty soon he came back. "Just a tiny peek won't hurt," he said to himself. He lifted a corner of the checkered towel from the bowl.
Wow! The bowl was clear full now with a large, puffy white lump. Jimmy just had to stick a couple of fingers into it . . . Poof! The soft white stuff fell back down into the bowl. Jimmy waited, but it didn't come back up. He waited and waited—nothing happened.
"I've got to hide this mess," Jimmy decided, "but I can't put it in the trash 'cause Mommy will see it there. I know—I'll bury it." He got his sand shovel and went out to the flower bed in front of the house. He couldn't dig very deeply with his little shovel, so he divided the white stuff into three smaller pieces and put each part into a shallow hole behind the plants. Then he scraped dirt back over them and took the bowl back into the kitchen. He washed and dried it carefully and put it away. Now the kitchen looked just as it had when Mother left it—almost.
Later in the afternoon, Daddy came home from work, and Jimmy could hear him and Mother talking in the kitchen. Soon they called him to come there as well. Daddy was holding Jimmy's shovel. "Did you leave your shovel out by the flower bed?" he asked.
"Um, hmm, I guess so," Jimmy admitted.
"And I am wondering what happened to the bread dough," Mother said. "Do you know anything about it?"
"Uh, no," Jimmy answered, but his heart began beating very fast.
"Come with us," Mother said. "We want to show you something." Jimmy followed his parents out of the kitchen, through the hallway, and out the front door. They stood in front of the flowerbed, and there Jimmy saw three lumpy white globs of dough rising from the small holes he had dug, each crowned with a sprinkling of dirt!
Jimmy began to cry and hid his face against his mother's legs. "I'm sorry, Mommy," he sobbed, and he told her all about disobeying and poking the bread and burying it and not telling the truth. Daddy was kind, but he was very stern when he explained that wrong cannot be kept hidden, and "Be sure your sin will find you out."
If something is to be hidden, let it be God's Word! "Your word I have hidden in my heart, that I might not sin against You."
MaryMartha
(All rights reserved)
Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Email: mrymrtha@gmail.com
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