The Search

I knew it was in there somewhere. The peach colored tunic I'd purchased to go along with a like-colored skirt had been hung in my closet, but had now gone missing. Why couldn't I find it?
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Off-and-on for some weeks I checked, and checked again. I looked in every closet and storage bin, but to no avail.
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It was so very frustrating. I knew it was there somewhere. I knew because I had put it there, and I had left it there.
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Eventually the missing tunic showed up. It was hanging adjacent to a similar colored shirt, and I had looked right at it many times without recognizing it. But as I switched items around one day, there it was. I felt like a CSI agent that had just cracked a case!
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Today, when I read Oswald Chamber's devotional, I realized how vitally important is the SEEK. Little is discovered or found without it, yet all too many expect it to be so with God. The wholehearted search that precedes the FIND is abandoned in favor of a lessor effort. I dare say it is sometimes itself a dare: "If there's a God, then __________." Fill in the blank.
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And then there's the flipside: "Why look for someone or something you have little need of?"
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Oswald has this to say:
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"Seek, and ye shall find." Luke 11:9

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"You ask, and do not receive, because you ask amiss." If you ask for things from life instead of from God, you ask amiss, i.e., you ask from a desire for self-realization. The more you realize yourself the less will you seek God. "Seek, and ye shall find." Get to work, narrow your interests to this one. Have you ever sought God with your whole heart, or have you only given a languid cry to Him after a twinge of moral neuralgia? Seek, concentrate, and you will find.

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I sometimes chuckle to myself when I reflect on my own years of seeking long ago. When I finally found what I had been seeking (often having missed Him in favor of something that appeared to be equal, or similar), I realized I had been found. What a strange twist to the rules for Hide-n-Seek! My seeking may have felt fevered and relentless, but nothing equalled His finding.

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The FIND, or the BEING FOUND, far surpasses the SEEK. Unfortunately, you can't have either without the latter.

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Wholehearted. It's the impetus for all SEEKS. Without it much remains hidden, and it need not be.

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Today I think I'll wear my peach-colored tunic.

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Resource: My Utmost for His Highest - Devotional

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