Seeking After God

Our heavenly Father desires an intimately connected kinship with us, much like a child's relationship with his parents. Such a relationship will be marked by a deep, mutual, other's-centered love. We cannot be seeking after God without the right attitude. Our hearts and minds must be open to Him and we must be willing to hear all that He has to say. When we seek after the Lord our journey should be characterized by:

Wholeheartedness. When we approach Scripture with other things on our minds we are distracted and when we pray with our focus drifting to other topics, we have a divided heart, and God desires our full attention. When we come to the Lord with only partial attention we are not truly seeking after God, we are like "a double-minded man, unstable in all he does." (Jas 1:8). He wants us to put Him in first place, making Him our primary concern above everything else important to us. (Jer 29:13; Matt 6:33)

Diligence. Our attitude should be one of a sense of devotion to God and paying close attention to what He is saying to us. We are not truly seeking after God if we aren't willing to wait on Him. And I sincerely believe we often wait on God when He's already given us the answer. We are simply not listening to Him and it's critically important that we listen while we wait. We must put out the unwavering effort necessary, no matter how high the cost, no matter how long the wait, to understand how He operates and what He desires us to do and learn and see and experience.

Persistence. Seeking after the Lord is a continual, constant effort toward establishing a deeper, more intimate relationship with God. Persistence is keeping at it, no matter how long it takes, until we find a greater involvement in His work. (Pro 3:5). How can we possibly establish a deep, familial relationship with the Lord if we don't trust Him to respond to our quest? We are truly seeking God when we try and try again. He promises our efforts will prevail. (Matt 7:7) We must have confidence in God. (Php 1:6). And we must keep at it. Persistence pays.

Humility. We are totally dependent on God for everything in life, including life itself, and He is pleased when we approach Him in humility. (Isa 66:2). Humility isn't so much the act of putting us down as it is raising up God in our hearts, our minds, and our desires.

Love. We cannot be seeking after God if we do not love others. For God is a God of love. He IS love and it is His love returned that goes out to other people. (1Jn 4:8). We simply can't love others as we should but we can allow God to love them through us. When we love others it is God's love working in us toward others. God intended it to be this way. He intentionally set it up this way. We simply can't seek after God without love. Love is the key word and without it we can't be seeking God. It is in love, that we come before Him and say, "Forgive me, Father." It is in love that we reach out to others who are otherwise unlovable. It is in love that we whisper, "I need You, Lord, and therefore I seek you with all my might! I can't live this life without Your love."

When our hearts long for God, He delights in revealing Himself to us and pouring out His blessings on us. (He 11:6). Periodically we should make an honest assessment of how earnestly we are seeking after God and increase it where it is lacking and enrich it where it is plentiful.

This has been a long, slow morning and I don't even have all my chores done. I'm blogging out of order. It's supposed to be chores first, then blogging. Oh boy, well it's too late now. I'll finish my chores as soon as I'm finished here. I got them half done before I started blogging so I wasn't completely bad. But maybe that's why I'm having such a problem typing today. Maybe I'm being punished for not finishing my chores before blogging. LOL. Seriously, don't you hate those days when your fingers just won't go to the correct key? Or it goes there at the wrong time, giving you lots of typos to fix? It's so bad for me this morning I can't seem to type a complete sentence without making a mistake. Usually I just breeze through my blog but this one I really had to work to get typed.

Michael is still gone but he called yesterday and he is in San Francisco. He will probably leave there for home Saturday morning. When he called I was afraid he was coming home right away and I hadn't really even had the chance to be by myself yet with all the meetings I've had since he left. It's not that I don't want him to come home. I'd be absolutely lost without him. It's just that I wanted to spend some time by myself. If you're not a loner, you probably think I'm a horrible person. I assure you, I am not, I just enjoy being alone for a time once every year or so.

Yesterday's high was 99.7. That's pretty close to 100 degrees. I thought the hot days were over. I even had to turn on the cooler. But I didn't have to turn it on until late afternoon when the sun really got around to the side of the house facing west, then it heated up. Today is supposed to be pretty much a repeat of yesterday so I went ahead and dressed in shorts this morning even if it was still a little nippy when I got up. It was cold enough last night to reach up and turn off the lower intake fan in the window. The air was too cold on my ear. Pepper was keeping my feet warm.

So far my cacti that I repotted still look okay. They're a little soft to the touch but they aren't drooping. I hope the root systems take quickly. It will be nice to have my cacti looking a little better than they did. I mean, they already look better since I repotted them. I'm just hoping that that look continues. So far the extent of my green thumb extends only as far as cacti. Anything else I've ever tried to grow, I somehow managed to kill. Well, I did successfully grow a pineapple and it was huge and beautiful. But we had an early frost last year and I forgot to bring it in. It only took the one frost to kill it.

I need to get busy doing something else besides sit here at the computer so I'm going to stop rambling and do what needs to be done (what I should have done before I started this blog). I have proofread today's blog twice and I'm just going to publish it with all remaining errors. It's so bad this morning that I'm making typos while I'm editing to delete typos. Yeesh!!