Hide and Seek

What matters most? If something is valuable then we seek it out, right? Remember playing hide and seek? Whether it was for something or someone, it is a game that puts us in the place of hunting for something of value. We even have Easter egg hunts that have special colored eggs that have extra-value if we find them, and we also hide the more valuable ones so as to be harder to find. Often times the more valuable the item, the harder it is to find.

It is the same thing with education or knowledge – the more “value” one sees in it, the more one pursues it. But knowledge is not “hidden” from you, it is just that it is something you do not have, and you get to choose whether or not you want to go find more of it. Each person is left to his or her own, to decide at some point. if they want to learn more…they get to choose the “value” on any future learning. I chose to stop my first year of college – I knew I knew enough.

I treated my faith with the same attitude – I knew I had what I needed. I did not see any value in learning more, because I was; one, not going to make some career out of it, and two, what good would it really do in the scope of my life?  So I left the religion game altogether, and figured I would just take what I had with me.

It was years before I realized something was missing, and that is a whole other post. Needless to say, I found myself lost, and what had been most important to me before, was no longer. So I started to look for what mattered most, and I found myself back at church with my then girlfriend. Then my values changed and I wanted to learn more about this faith I said I had enough of, and I even went back to school.

All too often, when it comes to matters of faith, we feel that they are hidden somewhere and we must find them and figure them out ourselves, right? Matters of faith are not things hidden from us. There is nothing hidden in areas of faith. Some people and religions want us to believe there is, and that they have the one and only way to figure it all out. They don’t.

God’s Word covers it all, and all of it is extremely valuable. Get to a church that teaches the Bible. Don’t debate styles of teaching, just consider the source – if it is not the Bible, it is wrong. We all don’t understand everything, and teachers should help us to understand true value while not trying to convince us what is most valuable to them. Our job is simply to seek…

The key is that we always want to be seeking what matters most:

Matthew 6:33 (NIV)

“But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

It is not about whether or not we should keep seeking in our lives, but that we should really consider what we are seeking first…just sayin’

In His Grip,

Pastor Pat