Keeping Things Hidden
How much shall we say?
by Claire Law
Suitable for Whole School (Sec)
Aims
To consider how we should navigate sharing information about ourselves with others.
Preparation and materials
- You will need the PowerPoint slides that accompany this assembly (Keeping Things Hidden) and the means to display them.
- You will also need three items, each covered with a thin blanket. Examples could include a football, a chair and a mug.
- Have available the YouTube video ‘O God, you search me and you know me’ and the means to show it during the assembly. The hymn is based on Psalm 139 and it is 3.23 minutes long. It is available at: https://youtu.be/mEGc3_D19Vo
Assembly
- Have Slide 1 showing as the students enter.
Explain that you have a challenge for the students and ask them who would like to play. The challenge is to correctly name some items that you have hidden under a blanket. - Select a volunteer and show them the first of the three items that is covered with a blanket.
Ask the volunteer to guess what is under the blanket. If they are finding it difficult, allow them to touch the item through the blanket to get a better idea.
After they have spent some time guessing, reveal the answer by lifting the blanket.
Repeat this process with the other two items. - Point out that this game involved the idea of hiding and covering. Note that it’s harder to make sense of things that are hidden or covered up.
- Explain that you are now going to think about the idea of inside and outside.
Show Slide 2.
Ask the students, ‘What do you see?’
Listen to a range of responses. - Point out that it is hard to tell whether the man is inside the house or outside it. It is an optical illusion, of course, but it helps us to think about things that we like to keep on the inside and things that we like to have on the outside.
- There are some things that are appropriate to do in public, and some things that we keep to the confines of our home. For example, unless we want to risk getting arrested, we don’t get undressed in public. This is an inside activity. Likewise, if we want to have a sensitive conversation with someone, we’ll choose not to do so in a public place where neighbours might overhear. We find a private space to speak.
- These ideas of inside and outside, covered and on show, relate to what we think and feel too. There are some thoughts that we are happy to share with other people, such as what football team we support or what our favourite colour is. However, there are other things about ourselves that we prefer to keep on the inside, and are more cautious about sharing with others. Our feelings of embarrassment, regret or fear may be things that we choose to tell only a few, trusted people, if we decide to tell anyone at all.
- Past experience can play a key role in how much we choose to share of ourselves with others. If we have been hurt by someone we once trusted, it can be hard to open up again to others. For some people, past hurt causes them to share nothing about themselves with others. It’s almost like they retreat into themselves and close down any connection with other people. They are looking after themselves by trying to avoid being hurt and betrayed again. However, in doing so, they lose the chance to have a positive, deeper connection with others.
- In a wider context, IT departments emphasize the importance of privacy and data-sharing in the online world; being careful with our personal data and sensitive information is extremely important when we are online.
There are many things to consider when it comes to deciding what we want to share about ourselves with others, and what we want to keep private.
Time for reflection
In a world where we can easily share things about ourselves on social media, how do we strike the right balance? How do we work out what we want to share publicly, and what we want to keep hidden or share only with a few trusted people?
Let’s take time to reflect on some questions that can help us to get the balance right. There are no definitive answers here; the key thing is to consider what feels right for each of us.
- Who in your social group do you trust?
- Who feels like a safe person for you to open up to?
- Who, by contrast, are you wary of?
- Do your friends seem to trust you by sharing details of their own life?
The quality of the relationship that we have with another person will help us to decide how much we want to share about ourselves with them. If we do open up and share something, we can go at a slow place and just tell our friend one or two things, rather than everything there is to know. This way, we can assess how that feels for us, and whether they seem to be trustworthy.
Another helpful question to ask is, ‘What footprint do you leave behind?’
Sharing some photos by passing round a printed album among a few family members leaves only a small footprint. However, sharing those same photos on social media sites, especially ones without the appropriate privacy settings, leaves a record that remains for the future, and can easily be shared again and again without our knowledge. Knowing this can help us to decide how much of ourselves we want to share with others and in which format.
To strike a balance between keeping everything about ourselves hidden and revealing everything, we should consider what we hope to gain by sharing a particular detail about ourselves.
Being able to share things with others can help to foster friendship and strengthen relationships. However, we must consider our motives. Stopping to assess what we hope to gain from sharing our thoughts and feelings with others helps us to have a sense of ownership about the conversations and communications that we choose to have.
We can also consider prayer as a form of sharing. For people of various faiths, prayer is a chance to open up and reveal more of themselves – their fears, hopes, feelings and thoughts - to a loving God. This God is someone they can trust to listen, care and not use what they share against them. In the Christian tradition, prayers often begin with the phrase ‘Our Father’, reminding Christians that God is like a trustworthy parent who is interested in their lives. Many people say that prayer helps them to be open and communicate their deepest feelings and thoughts.
In the Bible, we read that God already knows our thoughts, our feelings and what we are going through, even before we may choose to share that in prayer. We also read that God created us, and knows us intimately, including our strengths, our weaknesses and what matters to us. To trust in a God who already knows us through and through is to believe that, with God, we don’t need to keep things hidden.
Show Slide 3.
We are now going to listen to a hymn that uses the words from Psalm 139 in the Bible. This psalm speaks of God knowing us. As we listen in silence, let’s use this time to reflect on who we want to share the details of our lives with, and how we feel about sharing more of who we are with God, through prayer.
Song/music
‘O God, you search me and you know me’ by Bernadette Farrell, available at: https://youtu.be/mEGc3_D19Vo (3.23 minutes long)
