Prayer starts to feel more like a duty than a conversation with God. Scripture reads more like an instruction manual than a living message from Heaven. We show up at church, sing the familiar words, listen to a sermon, pray the prayers, and somewhere in the middle of it all we are thinking about the week’s responsibilities or this afternoon’s game. We know instinctively that God has not changed.
And often, we can see ways we have backed away. We have let ourselves become distracted, inconsistent, and numb. So, we assume that closing the gap must begin with us: pray harder, read more Scripture and more Christian books, serve better, and somehow recover the Godward energy that has gone missing. Examining our hearts is good, and so is returning to the life-giving practices or “means of grace” that have fallen by the wayside.
But underneath those good instincts, a more anxious assumption can settle in: God stays close to people who stay steady, and we have not been steady.In 40-plus years of following Jesus, I have felt that tension more than a time or two. I suspect you have felt it too.
So, what if Christian faith is sustained less by our search for God than by His search for us, and the mercy we set out to discover has been out looking for us the whole time? What if we are far more found than we feel?
There is a line at the end of Psalm 23 that many believers can recite from memory, though it’s hard to know how many of us dare to believe it: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever” (Psalm 23:6, ESV).