December 5
Click date to read more.
[timed-content-server show=”November 30, 2013 12:00 AM America/Chicago” hide=”December 5, 2013 12:00 AM America/Chicago”] No Peeking [/timed-content-server]
[timed-content-server show=”December 5, 2013 12:00 AM America/Chicago”]
“I will let you find me,” says the LORD. –Jeremiah 29:14
Read Jeremiah 29:11-14:
11 For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. 12 Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. 13 You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. 14 I will be found by you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back from captivity. I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile.”
As a child playing hide and seek with younger cousins, inevitably I faced a decision. If I hid myself too well, the game would never end. Or, perhaps worse: they would get tired of seeking, and I’d be stuck hiding interminably. On the other hand if I were to select an obvious place, the game was boring, both for me and for them.
It seems to be a common dilemma: I saw it over and over as the pre-teens and teens in a church youth group played a form of hide and seek called “sardines.”
One of my favorite memories is of an evening when we had just moved into our new house. Meredith was 5 and Alex was 2. One evening my husband Wayne and I sat on the front stoop watching them play Hide and Seek. Meredith found a hiding place, and Alex went seeking. He couldn’t find her, and she was able to run back to the stoop that served as ‘base.’ Then Alex found his hiding place, and it was Meredith’s turn to seek. She looked in the place where she had hid, and then was baffled. Alex was able to run back to base. Then Meredith hid again. In the same place. Alex looked for her…in the place he had been hidden. Over and over they hid and hunted, but each had just one hiding place, and that was the only place they looked! They each looked only where they themselves would have been found!
Sometimes we look for God that way, seeking only where we thing God should be: only in the place that we would assign for God. And then we take our turn and hide, both believing and fearing that God might not find us.
God finds us wherever we may try to hide. Even better, when we seek God, God promises not to hide. God even pops up sometimes if we are about to walk by without noticing his presence.
Sometimes as a baby in a barn, or an overstressed neighbor, or a lonely shut-in, or a homeless family…
Let a glimpse of God show today through you. Do an unexpected kindness for a stranger. Hold a door, let someone go ahead of you in line, pay a toll for the person behind you,…
Blessings,
Pastor Dorothy
[/timed-content-server]