Anchors Aweigh

This week has been one of those crazy life weeks. Husband has been working ridiculous hours; he leaves before anyone else is awake and doesn't get home until the big ones are about to go to bed. The kids are taking turns being bed-ridden sick. Donald Trump was elected President.

Sometimes it's just like that.

I finally shared this blog with the Husband last night, and then I felt compelled to re-read everything I have written to analyze what he might think of it. Yes, I'm one of those people. A few things stand out:

1. The slow and systematic removal of sippy cups FAILED. In fact, we had to buy more.
2. From the end of my first post: "I don't intend for this blog to be about me finding God." Hah! Joke's on you, Sarah.
3. I never shared the verse that inspired the title of that post, which seems a very fitting verse still:

"A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh."

Ezekiel 36:26

 In his book The Pursuit of God, A.W. Tozer said

"We pursue God because, and only because, He has first put an urge within us that spurs us to the pursuit."

God has been working on me for quite some time, I guess. Up until a year ago, maybe even less, I would have steadfastly denied it. There was a time when I thought that my being a good person, despite not relying on the Bible or God or the church to help make me one, was evidence against God. I had a pretty good moral compass all by my lonesome, I thought. It turns out my ideas about myself, among many other things, were pretty flawed.

My urge to pursue God was very subtle at first. It started out as a kind of gentle stirring. A vague thought in the back of my mind, buried deep in the clutter, that something might be missing. But it steadily grew and grew until it became a kind of hunger inside me.

I woke up this morning feeling very childlike. I have found myself reading the Bible with interest and wonder and wanting to talk about all the things (some of them disturbing) that I didn't even know were in that book. The things I don't know are infinite, y'all.

But the most surprising thing... is how real the pursuit and the relationship with God can be. I've just barely begun to grasp it. No one ever told me about it before. It always seemed so flat. Just like something else Tozer said:

"The whole transaction of religious conversion has been made mechanical and spiritless. Faith may now be exercised without a jar to the moral life and without embarrassment to the Adamic ego. Christ may be "received" without creating any special love for Him in the soul of the receiver. The man is "saved," but he is not hungry nor thirsty after God."

A week or so ago, I got an urge to go to church. I haven't bothered with church in a LONG time. The very thought of it exhausted me. But it popped into my head last week - you might say God put it there - and it wouldn't go away.

So last Sunday... I went.

I picked the church where I thought I would find the most genuine people, where I thought I would find substance, not just a facade people put on every Sunday like I remember. I showed up and looked for God in their faces and in their words and in the liturgy. (Liturgy is one of the infinite things I didn't know Before.) I think He was there. I want to go back, at least, and that's not nothing.

So, I think I should add a number 4 to my list up there: Big things are happening.

"Then ye shall call upon me, and ye shall go and pray unto me, and I will hearken unto you.

And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart."

Jeremiah 29:12-13