He’s Just Not That Hard to Find
I heard a worship song with a line repeated over and over again. It stuck! I thought about it all day, all week and then some. The phrase: “He’s just not that hard to find.”
As I pondered the impact of this single phrase, I was also reading the Parable of the Growing Seed. “This is what the Kingdom of God is like: A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come” (Mark 4:26-29).
Among other thoughts in the parable there are two important truths I reflected on:
1. There is a hidden power inherent in the seed itself that produces the harvest. The seed is the spoken gospel message that contains its own God given power to produce a harvest. This gospel message is captured in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that He gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
2. This gospel message is working all the time….when we sleep, when we are doing seemingly nothing but going along with the flow of life, while we are preoccupied with our own lives, when we are sad and when we are full of joy….all the time the gospel is at work in our world.
Then comes a time where people are vulnerable to looking around and looking up. They may be bored or hungry for something more, something new or a change. The gospel seeds have been at work and they are at work now! There is a ‘moment in time’ where people are ready to hear and accept the gospel because it has been at work, unknown to them, inside and outside them.
The coronavirus has put our whole globe off balance in a million different ways. We are looking for a way to get our lives back in balance. And so we are vulnerable when otherwise we would be closed or set in our ways with no impetus to look up.
When we trip and are enough off balance it awakens our fear button, “Yikes, I’m going down!” We reach out for something or someone to balance us….all of our cognitive, physical and emotional systems are awakened. The key is the loss of equilibrium and the strong drive we have to get it back.
The coronavirus is causing this reaction all over our world! Fear, loss, confusion, anger about the unknown. People are losing their known equilibrium and are reaching out to catch their balance! One common remark I am hearing is that people are bored, and they don’t like it. They always keep busy but now they can’t. Their life is off balance.
In these times, God is exceedingly aware, profoundly present and very available. “He’s just not that hard to find!”
A woman told me she recently became a believer. I asked her how? She said she was waiting in a grocery line. The man in front of her asked the checker how he was doing. The checker said, “Not very good.” The man said to the checker, “Have you ever thought about your life being touched by Jesus?” The checker said, “No, not interested.” The woman waited until the conversation stopped, then spoke to the man and said, “I’d like to know what you mean about being touched by Jesus.” The man spoke with her outside the store for 30 minutes, sharing the gospel. She was vulnerable and really listened. She had already been “primed” by someone else she knew who had been sharing Jesus with her.
I do Spiritual Direction with a pastor from the Midwest. He tells me consistently he walks into a Starbucks and just standing in line or sitting there, someone starts a conversation with him and he leads the person to Christ. Amazing! He says he has come to just be ready for it because it happens so often. The phrase comes to mind, “He’s just not that hard to find.”
How are you doing with this time of imbalance and the continuing effects of the virus? Whatever your response, let me encourage you: “He’s just not that hard to find.”
The absence of our normal rhythm of life is an opportunity for us to look up and allow Jesus in.
Take time to see if there is something you desire to experience with Jesus. Let him come into those open and empty places that have always been filled previously with something else. He has been at work in all of us, even though we likely have been unaware of it. He wants to make it easy for us to find Him.
Jesus comes close when situations distance us from life. The word gospel means, ‘Good news’. We are never very far from this good news of Jesus. He delights to show up in our life when we need him and look up.