I am coming to an unpleasant realization that forces me to acknowledge something that I’d rather not admit: I misplace a lot of things. In the midst of that, though, I have also come to believe that Jesus delights in helping me find the things I misplace. And the only conclusion I have been able to come up with is that the things that matter to me—though from the outside I’m sure they must seem so insignificant—matter to Jesus.
Why would that be?
I mean, we are talking about
Jesus of Whom it is said, “He is the radiance of the
glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe
by the word of his power.” (Hebrews 1:3 ESV) He upholds the universe, friends.
Not just my family, or our nation, or even this earth. The universe.
Colossians 1:17 (ESV) says something similar, “And he is before all things, and in him all things
hold together.” (For a more extensive description, check out Job chapters
38-41.) Doesn’t it just absolutely blow your mind that this same Divine, Supreme,
Creator-Savior Being desires intimate relationship with you?
Okay, so back to my personal
problem. Some of the more memorable items Jesus has helped me find are my
wedding/engagement/mother rings and a church check book.
Many years ago I worked as the
office admin for a church that was in the middle of a building project and one
of my jobs was to write checks for large sums of money to architects and
contractors (as well as to various missionaries and for the utility bills and
such). So I would have to carry the check book with me sometimes. And then one
day, I couldn’t find it. I don’t remember all the steps in my thought process
that led me to locate it in my car’s glove box but I do remember being keenly
aware that my thoughts had been divinely guided to the point of thinking to
look there.
My wedding ring was once my maternal
great grandmother’s (passed down through two other women to me). My husband’s
uncle created my engagement ring to match the 22k gold of that heirloom. My
mother ring was a gift to me from my husband on my first Mother’s Day after God
gave us our oldest son following many years of infertility. When I couldn’t find
them for several days, I was distraught, to say the least. I posted on facebook
and asked people to pray with me which felt risky because what if they never
turned up? Would someone’s faith be shattered?
This missing item case was where
the Holy Spirit gave me a lens through which to filter these losses. I realized
that Jesus knew exactly where these things were located. And He also knew
whether I actually needed to find them. In other words, He could catch my heart
and make me okay if they never turned up. I look back on this as the point in
time that I first began to realize that, to Him, these incidents were about drawing
me into relationship, into an experience of His presence with me.
Fast forward a bit and one of my
children is frantically trying to get a last-minute school assignment completed
and asking for my help in the wee hours of the morning. I was annoyed. I want
my children to desire relationship with me, not just look to me to come through
for them in their moments of desperation.
In an effort to check for the
plank in my eye before going off on the speck in my child’s eye (not that I
always do this, but the Spirit’s prompting must have been blatant on this
particular occasion), I went to my Heavenly Father, “is this how I relate to You?”
His gentle answer was, of course,
yes. All too often, I ask Him for what I desperately feel I need (like finding
a missing item) and even if I remember to thank Him for granting my request I
quickly move on to the next thing.
Ouch.
Fast forward a little further. My
youngest has asked me to help him rebuild a bunch of different Lego sets that
had been taken apart and the pieces all dumped together. As we are going about
this project, we are often searching for that one specific piece that can’t
really be substituted. Pretty early on, he began suggesting that we should pray
and ask God to help us find it*. Would you believe that nearly every time, we
find that piece within a matter of minutes, if not seconds?
I began feeling a bit uneasy
about this and took it to Jesus to ask if He really was okay with how we were
going about this. I received a mental picture that I believe was His answer to
my question.
The picture was of Jesus, in the
flesh, sitting right there on the floor with us helping us build the Lego set
and we’re all searching for that piece and He’s just the one with the knack for
finding all those seemingly lost ones. Like, I could almost hear Him saying, “Ha!
I found it.” But He didn’t just pop in for that one moment to find that piece
and then make Himself scarce. He was sitting there for the whole Lego Building
Party with us, interacting all throughout.
And this is the idea that I am
seeking to carry with me into any and every other part of my day: realizing
that Jesus is actually fully present with me for all of it.
The other day as I was facing
behavioral challenges with one of my children in the car, I let myself imagine
Jesus right there in the passenger seat, entering into the dialogue. And just
last night, as my husband was drifting off to sleep after our final
conversation and I turned my attention to conversation with Jesus, I felt a
twinge of regret, wondering if He would feel like I was turning to Him only
after everyone else had gone to sleep. But He reminded me of late night times
with my siblings or a group of friends who one by one turn in for the night and
in the end there are just two of you left and that’s sometimes the deepest
conversation of them all. In other words, He had been there as Joseph and I
were chatting and He was just still there and the conversation was going
to turn to something He and I would only talk about when it was just the two of
us.
There is a term for this: practicing
the presence of God. It is clearly something Jesus is inviting me into a
deeper experience of in this season of my journey of faith. He prompted a dear
friend to give me a treasure of a little book** on the topic last year and I have
just been digesting a few paragraphs here and there and then trying to put them
into practice. Sometimes, it looks like, “Jesus, come into this mess!”
Other times, it’s a more peaceful, “wow, Jesus, You’re here!”
I pray
that even today you will begin to experience Immanuel (God with us) in a deeper
way than ever before. And that it will awaken a deeper desire for that day we
are anticipating that John describes so powerfully in the book of Revelation (chapter 21, verses
3-5 and 22-23),
“Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with
them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their
God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes,
and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor
pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” And he who was
seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.”
And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the
Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine
on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb.
Come quickly, Lord Jesus!!!
*It seems I am known for this practice in my family. And yes, I even
pray for good parking spaces. :)
** The Practice of the Presence of God in Modern English by Brother Lawrence
