Solomon once wrote that God has set eternity in the hearts of men, but that in the end we cannot seem to make any sense of it. He somehow knew that deep within us is both our greatest evidence for God and our greatest connection to God. Jesus said that the kingdom of God was within, yet for the past two thousand years we have kept looking outward for this kingdom rather than inside us. I am absolutely convinced of one thing: God has placed cravings within our souls that will either drive us insane or drive us to Him. Our souls long for God; we just may not know it yet.
I lose things all the time [and as it turns out, so does my wife ... perhaps even more than I do ... so at all times there is a fairly good chance that there is a hunt going on at the Currieo hacienda]. I have literally spent untold hours of my life looking for lost items. This goes back to childhood, and when I was a kid, I used to think God was punishing me by hiding whatever object was missing. A bit of magical thinking I must admit now:) I was certain that I had committed some heinous crime against both God and humanity, and now God was punishing me by hiding my wallet, keys, ticket, fill in the blank. My parents would be exasperated saying things like "a place for everything and everything in its place." The past few years I must admit that I have done better in the keeping things in their place department ... but it is forty years too late.
Losing things drove me to prayer [and it really drives Janna to prayer even more than me]. I would spend virtually every minute of my search begging God to help me find whatever I had lost [or He had hidden]. I, of course, would also make untold promises to God about ways in which I could be more holy if He would just show me where the missing item was. Not that I was so good about keeping those promises mind you. I would wrack my mind for anything I could have possibly done wrong to cause said item to go missing and then do whatever I could to make it right ... frantically trying to find the one thing God was holding against me so that I could get Him to give back what was missing.
Most people, I am sure, might think this was a ridiculous thought process, but frankly it seemed to work pretty well [maybe that is why I kept doing it ... after all, a behavior reinforced is a behavior repeated as the psychologists tell us]. Most of the time I was able to get God off my back, repair whatever breach in the cosmos I had created, and find the missing watch, wallet, keys, radio or whatever happened to be lost at the time. Looking back now, I realize that the one thing that seemed to be lost all the time was me. I kept looking for me. Or really for who I was. Somewhere along the way from grade school to adolescence I had become lost.
We try to fill ourselves with everything we can grab [remember the Schlitz beer commercials in the 70s ... you only go around once in life so grab all the gusto you can?]. And yet there always seemed to remain an inescapable emptiness within. Even when we have looked everywhere else, even when there is seemingly no where else to even look, we still somehow fail to consider the possibility that what our souls long for is God. We cannot take enough [gusto, money, things, whatever] or make enough to fill the hollowness within us. No matter what we try to do we cannot seem to avoid the void.
Perhaps this is exactly what Jesus meant when He said, "What is it worth to gain the whole world, but to lose your soul?" Could He have been describing someone like me or you? We can spend our entire lives as slaves to our desires, determined to somehow satisfy the deepest longings of our souls. We can take everything that we get our hands on; we can keep everything that we grab a hold of; we can, in the end, become human versions of a black hole.
Yet there remains something deep inside us that pulls us toward God, something our souls long for that we cannot fully understand or comprehend. Doesn't it make sense that if we were created for relationship with the God of the universe, that He would leverage everything within us so that we would search for Him, to reach out for Him, and perhaps just end up finding Him?
So at the end of the day, we are back to our cosmic game of hide-and-seek. At this point, we might be asking ourselves, If God wants me to find Him and my soul craves to do so, then why doesn't He make it easier than this? How many of us have gone searching for God? I have. And frankly, I didn't feel much like He was cooperating at all [while now looking back I can see that He was there all the time]. And then when my propensity for losing things was factored in, it is a miracle that I ever ended up finding Him again at all.
When we lose something, we have to backtrack. Don't you just hate the question we always get asked whenever we lose something, "Where did you last have it?" If we knew that, then it wouldn't be lost, now would it? But like an investigator from Scotland Yard, we go retracing every step. When that doesn't work, sadly I too quickly move to Plan B ... blaming others. "Who lost my _____ [fill in the blank]?" Oh, that's right, we're talking about God. "Who moved my God?" Or worse yet, "My God, where did God go?"
Now I'll say it right here and now. It is a very bad thing to misplace the Creator of the universe. He could be just about anywhere [think of the infinite possibilities as to where this search might take us]. Or maybe in this case, everywhere. Sometimes hide-and-seek isn't a game.
So I asked around and I looked for God in the last place someone saw Him -- in religion. After all, millions of people around the world go to see God every week unless, of course, you were to interview them and then you might realize that they didn't see Him either. They were just there looking for Him, hoping that they could find Him. There may be nothing more frustrating or confusing than having tried God and then walking away with the bad taste of "religion" in our mouths.
So many of us spend our lives worrying that God is going to punish us or hoping that God is going to help us, but neither of these things ever seems to happen. For all the activity that there is in the world trying to get God's attention, it can leave us wondering whether it's all just a horrible waste of time. I couldn't really blame God, though. I never really got too mad at Him [except perhaps after my mother's suicide ... why couldn't I have a normal family like everyone else?]. I just figured that He was too busy with more important stuff or maybe more important people. So much of my life felt invisible. It seemed pretty arrogant and presumptuous of me to think God would actually notice me. Probably God was more of a big picture kind of guy. Maybe He just wasn't that into details. Or maybe, just maybe, there was more going on than I knew.
Over and over again, Jesus taught the value of the one to God. He described God as the shepherd who leaves the 99 sheep to find the one that is lost; the woman who searches for the one coin that is missing till she finds it; the father who waits patiently for his wayward son to return home to him. The one matters to God.
... To be continued ...
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