Earlier today I was scrolling through Instagram, and this phrase caught my attention: “Spending most of my days searching for someone I’ve already found.” It is the bio line on Beth Moore’s Instagram account, and it stopped me dead in my tracks before I even saw who wrote it because I knew it described me!
Shortly after reading that I heard Billy Graham say in one of his sermons from the 1980s that a famous woman wrote in her suicide note, “I only wanted to find a little happiness.” I assume she never found it.
Like the woman, he referenced, my problem is I am searching to fill a void, too, but in all the wrong places. I pursue happiness in food, possessions, people, accomplishments, approval… I think you get my point.
We live in an “instant” world. We can have instant everything from food to hair. My generation is probably on the fringes of being the last ones with any remote memory of life before every desire was quickly at our fingertips.
Our salvation is instant at the point of putting our faith in Jesus, but other than that, He can appear to be painfully slow and silent.
Contrary to the tempo of our culture, we do not depend on a microwaveable Savior.
Because my flesh wants instant everything, including happiness, and I possess the illusion of “self-salvation,” relying on Jesus sometimes does not even enter my radar until I have tried a million other things and am still holding a tall glass of water and dying of thirst.
I cannot tell you how often I have frantically searched for glasses that were on my head, keys that were in my hand and a purse that was on my shoulder. I was desperately looking for what I already had but did not remember.
On a more serious note, it grieves me that I waste so much energy and precious time searching the world for a Savior who is already in my heart, but I sometimes forget to acknowledge.
I am a lost lamb who daily needs to be found, put on the shoulders of my Shepherd and carried back home. I am a lost lamb, and that is ok because a Shepherd never forgets His sheep, not even one!