Not Alone

Though I hadn't seen a soul on the whole of my morning walk, I suddenly realized I was not alone. As I neared the stretch of road that borders a creek, I saw the flick of white tails and sudden motion moving away from me. My arrival had startled some deer lurking along the creek, hidden from my view by their coloring and the naked, early spring trees. I tried to take a picture of them with my cell phone, but they moved off too quickly, into the denser growth.

Though I thought they had moved on for good, I saw them again just a little while later. They had moved down the creek a ways, then up into someone's backyard. There were three of them, and they weren’t too far off. I realized that even when I thought they'd gone, the deer had still been pretty close the whole time. When I noticed they had appeared again, I thought to myself, maybe that's what God is like—Father, Son, Holy Spirit—right here, nearby. Maybe I don’t have to focus on all the seeking for God that I’ve been doing—like looking for unicorns.

I know we're taught to seek God. I've done a lot of learning and a lot of teaching others how to seek God: how to enter the presence of the Holy with intention, how to read the scriptures and listen for the Spirit's calling, how to attend to Jesus' presence in worship, fellowship, and everyday life. It seems like a reasonable thing for a pastor to do.

In fact, for a number of years, churches have developed worship services focused on people they call “seekers.” It became a thing to try to be the place that offered exactly what people were looking for, whatever that may be. Pastors and other leaders focused on offering answers for these seekers. It seemed like faith became based on our own efforts to understand God, and the church a place that made it as easy as possible to get to that understanding. Worship services and other events were scrutinized under the lens of “does it make sense to the seekers,” always referring to a certain group of people, usually those who had little exposure to the church as children or youth, and who weren’t very familiar with “traditional church.”

Of course, this is not the genesis of the whole idea of seeking. Scripture does tell us to seek God; how else will we learn what it means to be faithful and how it looks to live righteously? Jesus even says, “Seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” There is certainly room for seeking in the Christian life—and not just for those who don’t know “what it’s all about” already, or who haven’t been involved in church that long. We’re all called to be seek God faithfully.

Sometimes, however, I think we try to make a spiritual life entirely out of the seeking, when it's just as true that we need to understand in the depths of our souls that we have been found, already. While what we do does matter, the whole thing isn’t up to us. Even when we feel all alone, like we’re not finding what we’re searching for, God is there—maybe camouflaged by the brown-gray trees we're in the midst of, maybe standing in plain sight, just not where our distracted eyes are looking at the moment: a deer, not a unicorn—with us, in the common things. We're not alone.

Yes, seeking God may be important, but the joy and hope of the Christian faith is that God is seeking us all the time. As "A New Creed" says, "In life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with us. We are not alone. Thanks be to God."*

*"A New Creed." United Church of Canada, 1968 (rev. 1980, 1995))