Between the Two Ponds
One passage. One idea. A few quiet minutes. Short devotional readings for people being formed by grace, written from a small chair beside still water in Falcon, Colorado.
Pull one up. Read slowly. There is no hurry here.
A Psalm for It
My favorite psalm is Psalm 42, and I do not think that is an accident.
"As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God." (Psalm 42:1)
As the deer pants for the water, so the soul pants for God. That is not a psalm of arrival. It is a psalm of thirst. The man writing it is not describing a full cup but a dry mouth, and he is describing it while remembering how things used to be, how he once went up to the house of God with the sound of a festival crowd. He is not there anymore.
And then, twice, he turns and speaks directly to his own soul. Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God. He is arguing with himself, out loud, on paper, in a hymn we have kept for three thousand years.
That is the whole reason the Psalter exists. There is a psalm for every condition a person will ever be in. The rage and the doubt, the guilt and the exhaustion, even the morning you did not want to be alive, it is all in there, and it is all in there on purpose. God saw to it that when you walked in on the worst day of your life, you would find that someone had already stood exactly where you are standing, and had left a flower for you to find. So do not face the dry season wordless. Go into the garden, find the psalm planted for your thirst, and let a man three thousand years dead teach your soul how to talk to itself again.
Whether You Still Want to Be Found
Three things came clear while I was praying through Jeremiah, and they came in this order. Not for disaster. Look for me. I will be found by you.
"You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord." (Jeremiah 29:13-14)
Notice what God does not say. He does not say, I will find you and drag you out. He says, I will be found by you. There is a world between those two sentences, and much of your life with God turns on which one you believe is happening. He is not hunting you down like a man after lost keys. He is making himself findable, and then he waits to see whether you still want to be found.
A young child loves to be found. Hidden behind the curtain, he cannot keep from giving himself away, because the hiding was never the point. The whole ache of it is the moment the door opens and someone says, there you are. It is only as we grow older that we learn to hide well. We learn to hold still and let the footsteps pass. We learn that being found might cost us something, and we get very good at not being found, and we call it privacy, and we call it strength, and we call it managing our lives. And then we wonder why God feels far away.
He has not moved. He has promised to be found by those who seek him with the whole heart, and the whole heart is the difficulty, because a divided heart reaches for him with one hand and keeps the other on the curtain. God is not the problem. Your willingness is.
So do not ask today whether God is near enough to be found. He has settled that. Come out from behind the thing you have been managing, and let him find you where you actually are. The question was never whether he is seeking. The question is whether you still want to be found.