There To Be Found

Deuteronomy 4:29 But if from there you seek the LORD your God,
you will find him if you seek him with all your heart and with all your soul.

     I have ADHD! I forget things all the time. I am working on a project, realize I need something to complete the project, go to get that something and before I can retrieve it I have forgotten what I was going to retrieve. Or along the way I get distracted and forget about the project altogether! This drives me nuts! It also drives my wife of almost 40 years nuts as well.
     I have come to realize that I really don't forget those things. They just drop to the bottom of the thought queue. They will pop up and briefly pass through my mind days or weeks later. But before I can write them down, they are gone again, only to resurface and drop off at another random time.
     I am glad the LORD is not ADHD! He is always ready for us to return. He has open arms for us. Even when we have purposely walked away, He is there waiting for our return.
    This was really good news for the Israelites. It was news they would hear now, but not put into action for years to come. But the seed was planted. When they had wandered away and suffered the consequences of their separation from the LORD's blessing, they could know that they could return and be accepted.
     The one condition that continues, before the walk away and after the return, is that we come with all that we are. The LORD wants us to completely yield to Him. He doesn't want part of us. He knows that yielding 100% is what is best for us. It is the way we were designed to exist.
     And yet we often think we can give part of ourselves to something/someone other than the LORD. We cordon off parts of our lives in hopes that they won't affect our relationships with others. He have places that we don't yield to His intervention.
    When we do that we limit His ability to transform us and redeem us. Do we really want to limit our Creator from forming and making us into the best version of ourselves?

Squirrel

Proverbs 3:21-26

I can be easily distracted, rabbit, as I walk through life. Some of it has to do with my ADHD tendencies. I have spent my adult life trying to focus. Like the character in the movie “Up” my life is filled with interesting distractions. That dog gets pulled aside in an instant by the smallest things. Sound familiar?

Our text today validates our universal tendency to get distracted from important things. The writer tells his reader to keep wisdom right in the center of his view. Just like texting and driving is dangerous, so navigating life without keeping wisdom as our anchor point is dangerous. We need to have it always right at our finger tips, right in our immediate surroundings. He uses the image of the necklace again.

So how long do I have to be distracted in order to get in trouble? With texting it only takes a second to make a fatal mistake. The proverb doesn’t say how long. It does say that keeping wisdom central will keep us safe. We won’t need to worry about enemies coming at night. Wisdom will give us warning so that we won’t be taken by surprise.

These sound like some pretty remarkable benefits. Why would anyone not listen to wisdom? Well, to be quite honest, because we don’t get to do what we want at the moment we want to. Wisdom will get in the way of our freedom, freedom to make stupid choices! We won’t be able to go our own way.

As Westerners, we value freedom above even making good decisions. If a decision inhibits freedom, we would rather make the wrong choice. And as a result, we are pretty messed up as a culture. We allow the porn industry access into every mobile device because we don’t want to impinge on the rights of those who exploit women and children. Porn has no redeeming value, but we stand side by side with the greatest perversions in the name of freedom.

In the name of freedom we beat up marriage as an institution because we are unwilling to declare that single parenting is not as healthy as having a mom and dad. So as a result we have 70% single parent births in some large sectors of our population leading to poverty that travels through generations. All this because we aren’t willing to hold men and women responsible for their sexual activities. Freedom!

Wisdom will guide if we are willing to heed its voice of instruction.