I hate crying on airplanes. Not other people’s crying, just my own. Claustrophobic, surrounded by strangers, with just a cocktail napkin or your sleeve, it’s not a great setting for a good cry. Yet somehow, 30,000 feet up, I always tear up. Always. If you know me at all, you’re probably saying, “You cry everywhere. What’s the difference?” You’re not wrong. But airplane crying is the worst. Good thing I don’t travel a lot.

The last time was a few months ago, and I couldn’t help it. I was packing my bag the evening before the trip when my phone rang. The caller ID showed one of my closest friends. I answered it only to hear crying on the other end of the line. Over the next couple minutes I got the full story. It’s not my story to share, but I knew it had changed my friend’s world in an instant. He was devastated, rocked by the moment when a hidden pain suddenly spilled into the open.

The next day, I boarded the flight without my friend, haunted by the last words from our phone call: I never could’ve imagined… I had no idea.

As our plane lifted into the air, my heart grew heavier for my friend, and even for all the strangers surrounding me. I kept wondering:

How many secrets are strapped into these seats?

How many of us are carrying hidden pains? How many of us are weighed down by things we can hardly admit to ourselves, much less the people who love us? And what toll does it take on us, all this hiding?

The Sunday previous, I as listening to a sermon when a couple sentences caught my attention:

You can bring God anything. Nothing needs to stay hidden.

I didn’t hear much after that. I was suddenly reliving my childhood and all the night games I’d played along with the other neighborhood kids: flashlight tag, kick the can, ghosts in the graveyard.

Of all the games we’d rotate through, the unrivaled favorite was hide and seek. The whole neighborhood was :in bounds,” and so were the surrounding woods, so a single round could last an hour or more. That’s an awful long time to stay hidden, crouched somewhere, keeping to the shadows, swatting at mosquitos.

Winning at hide and seek—staying out of sight until the bitter end—didn’t always feel worth the pain.

On the plane that day, I kept thinking about those games and how we sometimes pride ourselves on just how well we can keep things under wraps. I started writing. I wrote about how most of us are hiding parts of ourselves and even hiding from ourselves. Through tears, I wrote about how we’re all playing this game, trying to win at life by hiding as well as we can for as long as we can.

Over the next few weeks, I whittled down and refined those thought into the script for Wonderhunt’s film, Hide and Seek. It may be a short film, but when I watch it, I find it has a lot to say to me. I hope it speaks to you too. I pray (literally) that it encourages you to recognize the ways you might be playing a losing game and brings you closer to a God who operates by very different rules.