A couple weeks ago, our family decided to stave off the Covid distancing doldrums with some Dykstra Family Olympics! Ya know, since the real Olympics aren’t happening. Our events consisted primarily of doing normal household or outdoor tasks, but without the use of typical tools or appendages. In other words, soccer. In other other words, doing things the hard way.
However, I lost this event to a first-grader…badly.
This created many moments of hilarity, with our kids getting lots of chances to laugh at their parents’ ineptitude. Except of course when dad won the “How Many Books You Can Carry Using Your Head Instead of Your Arms” event. That gold medal never tasted so sweet. Ahem, sorry. But our hijinks also produced numerous frustrations, as we often couldn’t figure out how to get around the obstacles that made our pursuits unnecessarily difficult. No matter how much we enjoyed competing or how dedicated we were, trying to do a task too quickly or from the wrong mindset kept us from completing it as desired.
Even as I type this, examples of my own haste and misunderstanding come to mind. For me, doing things the hard way often consists of wanting to get something done so fast that I impatiently skip steps or take damaging shortcuts. Maybe for you it looks different. But for seemingly all of us, there seems to be one task that is frequently done the hard way: pursuing God. Granted, part of it is that we just don’t have a lot of experience building a relationship with a person we can’t see or hear. But much of it is that we simply don’t truly see this task as building a relationship at all. We might say that we do or even think that we do, but the way we go about it demonstrates that we don’t.
For example, perhaps you aspire to spend some quiet time with God regularly, but that encounter is defined by reading a rather random chapter of the Bible and then abruptly stopping, or something similar. As dedicated as you might be to it (and reading the Bible certainly is an admirable practice!), do we put such a manufactured, fixed time limit on a 1-on-1 gathering with anyone else? Do we stop someone in mid-thought or even mid-sentence (as some biblical chapters end) and say, “Time’s up!”? Of course not.
Or perhaps it’s not how long we spend with God; it’s our motive during that time. I fully admit sometimes thinking of being with God as nothing more than an item on my checklist-for-good-Christians. Bible reading today? Check. Prayer? Check. But who goes unmentioned then on my self-accomplished spirituality list? God! Inevitably, seeking God in these and other hard ways leaves us frustrated because the task becomes something other than actually seeking God. So what is the solution? Well, very simply, it’s seeking God by pursuing him like any other relationship.
First, realize that your time in prayer or learning what God has to say is a relational time, not a job. Think about what you hope to chat about before you do, recalibrating your mind for socializing, not business.
Second, when you sit down to absorb God’s words, don’t stop until you can identify precisely how you know him better (Click to tweet). Or keep reading and learning until any specific reason for engaging in the conversation has been fulfilled. It may take two minutes or an hour, just like it does with any other relationship.
The purpose of a spatula is NOT to flip things other than food!
Third, understand that you’re fulfilling your very purpose and demonstrating your desire for heaven when you engage God, not just doing the Christian thing. God fashioned us to seek and find him, uniquely knowing what’s best for his created, (Acts 17:26-27, Isaiah 48:17-18), and he offers us a heaven centered around finishing that task in perfect community with him (Click to tweet)! When you seek him the easy way, you not only know exactly why and how your relationship with God improved, you know you want to pursue and are pursuing the heavenly discovery of God you were created for. And that’s the easiest way – not the hardest – to keep you coming back for more!
Further explore your purpose, God’s heaven, and how they answer so many of our difficult questions about him in the free ebook series Healing Hereafter! Available in two clicks right here.
