The Lord says, “I was ready to respond, but no one asked for help. I was ready to be found, but no one was looking for me. I said, ‘Here I am, here I am!’ to a nation that did not call on my name.”
Isaiah 65:1 NLT
There’s that old joke about the elderly woman who is in the hospital with very poor health. It seems it may be her time to go, so her pastor stops by to visit with her, possibly for the last time. Upon arriving the pastor says, “Mrs. Jones, I’d really like to talk to you about the hereafter.”
Mrs. Jones replies, “Oh good, I’ve been wanting to talk to someone about that!”
“You have?”, the Pastor asks.
“Oh yes. I keep walking into rooms and thinking, `Now what was I here after?’”
I can certainly relate with Mrs. Jones, even at my relatively young age! In fact, just today I went downstairs to the basement to grab something that should have been on my desk in a white plastic bag. I didn’t see it right off, but I saw a few other things that I had been meaning to bring upstairs so I took them upstairs instead. Upon returning upstairs, I looked around for the white plastic bag but I still couldn’t find it, so I went back downstairs. When I went back downstairs I looked again, I didn’t see it, looked a few other places and still couldn’t find it. Finally turned around to give the first area where I expected it to be a good hard look and then I saw it! It had been placed about a foot away from where I thought it was and that is why I it hadn’t seen it! I should also mention that I did briefly look for this plastic bag the day before too, albeit half-heartedly, but hadn’t seen it that time either.
All this to say, if it is this easy for us to miss things we know are in plain sight, how easy is it for us to overlook God when we are not actively trying to seek Him? In Isaiah 65:1 the Lord says, “I was ready to respond, but no one asked for help. I was ready to be found, but no one was looking for me. I said, ‘Here I am, here I am!’ To a nation that did not call on my name.” (Isaiah 65:1 NLT) Ouch! Have we done that too? Or should I say, how many times have we done that ?
So many times we are trying to make a hard decision, seeking guidance in a tough situation and what do we do? We open our Bibles randomly hoping to find a magic verse before muttering a quick prayer. And then we wait—for five whole minutes—and then we jump up to go talk to our spouse, friend, or other family member to ask what they think God’s will is.
But God isn’t Santa waiting for our requests. And He isn’t a gumball machine waiting to spit out the exact thing we want as soon as we ask. Sometimes He gives us what we ask for just after we ask; other times He allows us to wait. And there are those times He does not give us what we want. Knowing God and His will is a relationship we have to invest in. Now granted, there are times when He will answer our prayers quickly, and there are times when He may seem to not much care about our requests because his silence can seem so definite. But what He wants the most is for us to invest in a relationship with Him; that we seek Him—so when we need Him, we will know that He has been with us the whole time.