One day during the fall of 2011, I awoke suddenly in the middle of the night and sat up straight in bed. As far as I could tell, nothing in particular had caused me to wake up. I didn’t hear any noise and the house was still. But a phrase immediately popped into my head, and I couldn’t help silently repeating it to myself: “Seek the Lord while He may be found. Seek the Lord while He may be found. Seek the Lord while He may be found.” At the time, I didn’t know that it was a Bible verse, but I knew that God had woken me up and given me those words.
Now, it must be said that this was an unusual occurrence for me. I do believe that God speaks to His people, but most commonly it’s through reading or hearing His Word. But I know God can and does speak to His people in other ways. We see examples of it in the Bible. I have a friend who will occasionally have intense dreams that mirror what she’s going through spiritually at the time. I have also personally experienced times when God will put something on my heart to say or do, when I know I couldn’t or wouldn’t have ever done so on my own. But as unusual as this particular occurrence was for me, I knew God put those words in my mind for a reason.
Not that I did anything about it at the time. It was something like 2:30 in the morning, and I was very much still sleepy. I remember thinking that I should get up and spend some time in prayer to “seek the Lord” and see if there was something that He wanted to show me in those wee morning hours. But what I ended up doing was lying back down, turning over, and falling back to sleep.
After I had slept in, I got myself ready and headed to a local Starbucks with my laptop to search for and apply for jobs online, as was my routine. Once I had settled into a large chair and opened my laptop, I went first to the Web site of my favorite Bible teacher, Jon Courson. On his main page, he always has a daily devotional, and I enjoy reading them as bite-sized spiritual lessons for the day. But when I read that day’s Bible verse, I immediately froze in my seat. I remember feeling blood rush to my head. The first line in the devotional read:
“Seek ye the LORD while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near. Isaiah 55:6”
If I wasn’t sure before, I was now certain that God was trying to get my attention. And the truth was, I needed Him to. In general, I have a tendency to focus on myself and my circumstances and not on God. I constantly think about all that has to get done, I worry about not doing enough or being good enough, and I panic if I feel like things are not going according to (my) plan.
In the fall of 2011, I felt particularly lost. The year before, I had moved across country for grad school, then had a change of heart and dropped out after my first week of classes. After only four months, I returned home to Oregon. My big, grand plan for the next two years was now lying upside-down in a dumpster somewhere in Boston, covered in old, stale Dunkin’ doughnuts. I spent the next several months looking for and applying for jobs in Portland that were related to my English degree, but no one wanted to hire a writer/editor with no professional writing/editing experience. In the midst of that, a few months after I returned home from the East Coast, my dad passed away from esophageal cancer. That brought another change from life as I had known it.
I hadn’t gotten anywhere with finding a job in Portland, and after everything that had happened I was ready for a fresh start. I decided to move to Fresno, California to live near extended family and enjoy a change of scenery. I moved in with family and began seeking employment. Getting a good job was the answer: the thing that would make leaving grad school okay, the thing that would make moving to California not crazy, the thing that would validate me as a college graduate and adult. But even in California, writing and editing jobs were eluding me. I didn’t know what to do.
“Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near.”
I had been so wrapped up in my circumstances that I wasn’t even seeking God and asking Him what I should be doing. It was like I had a round peg in my hand and I kept trying to make it fit in a square hole, but the peg just kept falling out. Even still, I kept picking it up and jamming it in again. I needed a square peg, and the whole time it was lying in the Lord’s hands, and He was just waiting for me to ask Him for it.
In hindsight, this illustration works for so many different times in my life. Almost every time I think, “THIS is what should happen,” it doesn’t. Typically, I look at deviations from my plans as failures; that I have failed to make something happen that should have happened; that good things that were supposed to happen in my life are now no longer going to happen. I forget that God is in control and always knows what He’s doing. Just a couple verses down from Isaiah 55:6, it says:
“For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways My ways,” says the Lord.
“For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways,
And My thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8-9)
If we’re not seeking the Lord in our daily life – for help, for wisdom, for direction, for peace, for strength – then we aren’t going to know His thoughts or ways, and we’re going to keep reaching for that stupid round peg. “A man’s steps are of the Lord; how then can a man understand his own way?” (Proverbs 20:24). Moreover, we could end up missing God's far greater, higher plans for us and blessings we never even imagined.
In Fresno, I ended up getting a part-time job at a mortgage loan company. My position was expendable, and my living situation with family was temporary. So when Ethan and I were getting to know each other long-distance by Facebook messages and e-mails, and those letters grew into lengthy daily phone calls interspersed with loving texts, I felt more and more willing to end my stint in California and return home to Oregon to continue our relationship in person.
If I had gotten a really awesome job in writing or editing down in California, or even up in Portland, I may never have started getting to know Ethan, or I may very well have been unwilling to give up my job and move to Central Oregon to be with him. Not that it wouldn’t have been tempting, but if I was invested in my plans and not the Lord’s, then my decisions would likely have looked very different.
A couple years after my time in Fresno, I was driving in Bend on my way back to work as the lunch hour was coming to a close, and I ended up behind a car that had a bumper sticker I had never seen before. In large letters it read, “Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near. Isaiah 55:6.” Apparently, I still need the reminder from time to time.
If you're like me and you find yourself tired and frustrated from trying to make your own round pegs fit, here are three other great reminders to seek God and spend time with Him in prayer:
“The Lord is near to all who call upon Him, to all who call upon Him in truth” (Psalm 145:18).
“Draw near to God and He will draw near to you” (James 4:8).
“For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord. Thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon Me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:11-13).
And in case you’re curious, here is the devotional by Jon Courson that I read that day back in 2011:
Seek the Lord while He may be found. Why? Because in Genesis 6:3, God said His Spirit would not always strive with man. If you’re not saved, there will be a time when you may seek the Lord, but you won’t be able to find Him. There comes a time when all hope of salvation is lost and all that’s left is despair.
Hearing the crowds gather, Bartimaeus asked what was happening. “Jesus of Nazareth is coming,” he was told.
When he heard Jesus and His disciples walking down the road, he cried, “Son of David, have mercy upon me.”
“Be quiet!” the crowd scolded. But Luke tells us Bartimaeus cried all the more, causing Jesus to stop and ask him what he wanted.
“That my eyes might be opened,” Bartimaeus answered.
And at that point, Bartimaeus was healed (Luke 18).
What if Bartimaeus had said, “Jesus is coming, huh? I’ve heard He can do some amazing things. Next time He comes by, I’m going to cry out to Him. Next time He’s in the area, I’ll call out to Him.” If Bartimaeus had not cried out at that time, he would never have been healed.
So too, the Holy Spirit comes by us and whispers, “Go pray. Take a half hour and read the Word. Go for a walk through your neighborhood with Me.” Rather than an audible voice, these are impressions that tug on our hearts. If you put them off, you may find you missed a unique opportunity to receive a healing, a blessing, a work of God in your life.
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