Seek. Ponder. Seek Again.

Finding God Is Not the End of Seeking

Search for the Lord and his strength; continually seek his face.

— Psalm 105

I will ponder the glorious splendor of your majesty and all your marvelous works.

— Psalm 145

Yesterday we returned from our Holy Cross Day observance to the regular Sunday readings, and carried a little of the Light with us. We found Moses and the Israelites back in the wilderness, where the crowd wasn't always certain which direction it wanted to go. We considered the crowd, the visionary, and the difficult work of discernment.

How do we find enough Light to see where we're going?

Today's Psalms offer a wonderfully simple answer.

Seek.

“Search for the Lord and his strength; continually seek his face.”

What strikes me about Psalm 105 is who is being told to seek. These aren't people who have never heard of God. The Psalm itself recounts the extraordinary story of God's relationship with Israel—Egypt, deliverance, the wilderness, bread from heaven. These are people whose story is filled with evidence of God's presence.

And they're still told to seek Him.

Not occasionally. Continually.

Perhaps finding God isn't the end of seeking God.

That seems almost obvious when we think about other relationships. Relationships require attention. Friendships that matter require some investment. A couple may stand together on their wedding day having already found one another, but nobody imagines that finding each other completes the relationship. In a sense, that's when another kind of seeking begins.

My grandmother once told me something about her fifty-five year marriage to my grandfather that I have never forgotten. “Had your grandfather and I lived fifty years later, we'd have gotten divorced many times over,” she said. “Divorce was not an option. Period.”

She wasn't establishing a rule for everybody else's marriage. She was describing theirs. Whatever difficulties arose between them had to be encountered within the relationship. The relationship continued to require something of them.

So does ours with God.

It can be tempting, particularly for those of us who have been Christians for many years, to think of seeking God as something beginners do. The seeker is the person outside the church wondering whether any of this is true. Once you've found God, you're finished seeking.

Psalm 105 says otherwise.

And that gives me something to remember when I encounter the cynicism, hostility and sometimes outright ridicule of Christianity that appears regularly in my social-media feeds. My first instinct can be to answer it. Correct it. Defend what I believe.

But I don't actually know what another person is seeking.

Someone angrily attacking Christianity may be wrestling with questions I know nothing about. Someone sitting comfortably in church every Sunday may have stopped asking questions years ago. I certainly cannot look across an Internet connection and reliably determine the condition of somebody else's relationship with God.

I can examine my own.

Am I still seeking?

Then Psalm 145 gives us another wonderful word.

Ponder.

“I will ponder the glorious splendor of your majesty and all your marvelous works.”

Seek what you haven't seen. Ponder what you have.

Maybe that's why Israel needed the reminder. Human memory is remarkably short. Yesterday's miracle can become today's background scenery. The people who escaped Egypt could still become frightened in the wilderness. The people who received bread could still wonder where tomorrow's meal would come from.

So we ponder.

During my years in corporate leadership and organizational development, we sometimes worked with continuous-improvement models. One of the best known is the PDCA cycle: Plan, Do, Check, Act. You make a plan, do the work, examine what happened, make adjustments—and begin the cycle again with more information than you had before.

God isn't a quality-management project, of course. But there is something wonderfully familiar about the movement.

Seek.

Spend time with God. Pray. Worship. Study His Word. Pay attention.

Ponder. What happened? What did I learn? Where did I see God? Where might I have missed Him?

Respond.

And then—seek again.

Except we don't return to precisely the same place. What we have experienced and pondered changes the way we seek the next time. Perhaps the spiritual life is less like traveling around a circle than moving along a spiral, encountering familiar questions from a place we haven't occupied before.

Holy Cross Day invited us to walk toward the Light. Yesterday's readings reminded us that we need enough Light to discern where we're going.

Today's Psalms remind us not to assume we've arrived.

There may be nothing particularly alarming about someone saying, “I haven't found God yet.”

Perhaps the more dangerous sentence is:

“I've already found Him. There's nothing more to seek.”

Psalm 105 answers:

Continually seek His face.

Psalm 145 adds:

Ponder.

And tomorrow?

Seek again.

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