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Are you actively searching?

‘Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.’ (Jesus in Matthew 7: 7-8, from the NRSV Updated Edition 2021)

This summer Karen and I had a fantastic, if somewhat unusual holiday – taking a cruise up to Svalbard in the Arctic Circle. I spent a good deal of time on board stood at the pointy end of the ship with my binoculars and bobble hat, searching for signs of wildlife. Whales, dolphins, eagles, skuas, and even a walrus. Wonderful!

On a very regular basis other cruisers would walk past me and the other assorted owners of binoculars and long lens cameras and ask, ‘Seen much?’ And some of them would comment that they had been on board all week and seen nothing, and then they would keep on walking and head back to the bar or the pool… There was plenty to see, but you had to look for it!

In one narrow fjord we were watching a White Tailed Sea Eagle perched on a tall tree on the forested slopes by the waterline when I noticed something unexpected. We were being watched by an Elk. We weren’t looking for Elk. We weren’t expecting to see Elk from the deck of a cruise ship. But there it was! The European version of what the Americans call a Moose – the largest and heaviest living species of deer – watching as we sailed past. Richard, the excellent professional photographer and ORCA guide on board, took a quick snap of what we would all have missed if I hadn’t been looking to see what might be found.

Search, and you will find. U2 sang ‘I still haven’t found what I’m looking for’, echoing a sense of existential restlessness many of us feel. We believe that we will find what we are looking for in God. ‘The human heart is restless until it finds its rest in God.’ (Augustine) But even once we have found God, (or perhaps we should speak of having been found by God?), the searching needs to continue. More of God – going deeper into God. In an old spiritual classic, A.W. Tozer’s Pursuit of God, he writes, ‘We have been snared in the coils of spurious logic that insists that if we have found God we need no more seek God.’ We will find all that we need in God, but the searching needs to continue. 

Whale-watching taught me that you are much more likely to find what you are looking for if you are actively searching. Are we actively searching for God – praying, reading, listening, serving? And my encounter with an Elk teaches me to be open to the unexpected! As we seek for God we might find that God is bigger and deeper and wider and wilder than we ever anticipated… Amen?

This weeks thought was written by John Goddard, Minister at Saffron Walden baptist Church and EBA Trustee

(The photographs are used courtesy of Richard Lovelock, who would love you to explore the conservation and advocacy work of ORCA at orca.org.uk)