Jeremiah 29:11-13 – Newness, with Some Old Ingredients
11 For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. 12 Then you will call upon Me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. 13 And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart. Jeremiah 29:11-13, New King James Version
I typically tell a pretty streamlined story of deepening faith. I met Rock Bottom having failed as a teacher in three different impoverished settings. I, consciously or not, foisted myself on these communities as the Great White Hope. The Lord repeatedly exposed the difference between condescension and true compassion, between recognizing mutual brokenness between Helper and Helped and the pedantic overcompensation I mustered again and again.
Pushing thirty, my lofty sense of myself butted daily against making minimum wage in a computer lab. It was then that I began to realize by God's grace what I was hungry for. With time and bandwidth to spare, I began to dig into God's Word. By that renewing grace, I resolved two things: (1) I would read the Bible every day whether I felt like it or not. (2) If the King of the Universe spoke to me, I would write it down.
I did, and I have truly never been the same. These disciplines as much as any professional retooling have given me purpose and passion. His Word which God exalts above His Name is so much more the key to life He grants than is the human understanding He tells us not to lean on. The true Happily Ever After is that since those days I have been in the Bible, writing, reflecting, refining my thinking almost every morning. I have, by the grace of that discipline, seen new days differently, with the sun of His mercy rising on each one.
Here's the thing: looking back, Rock Bottom doesn't seem so low. Even there, I recognize His prevailing grace and mercy in retrospect. As God likes patterns, He suggests this might be so in Jeremiah 29:11-13. Look at the position of the unmistakable THEN that leads off verse 12.
That word recasts the scope of the grace and mercy in the famous verse before it. Peace? He gives it. Protected by Him from despair, and from any true want because of Social Security Disability, and also vision and advocacy of a Vocational Rehabilitation counselor who bucked policy norms and fought to use her agency's funding for training beyond the Masters degree I already had, I had time to reflect on my next move.
Enrolled in a Masters program in Rehabilitation Counseling, He literally surrounded me with people who made a profession and professorships out of future and hope. Working with other adults, I got to see myself reflected back as something other than a feckless and pretentious teacher in the eyes of some kids who didn't have many other models. I realize with the passing of years that I was still an awkward adolescent myself. Irrespective of age, I had a lot to learn.
I plugged into the idea that my story, harrowing for me, if not in comparison to the ups and downs of some other people's experiences, could be used to help inspire and instruct others. There is a potential false gospel there, though. It is at least as ominous as an addict's potential drug relapse.
I could have found my meaning in new friends, new credentials, an alternate sense of professional effectiveness. I could have, in those reflective moments the computer lab granted, simply switched idols.
That I, granted peace and not evil, a hope and a future, in keeping with Jeremiah 29:12 reached the THEN of a heart renewed in Him rather than another go on the human services carousel is a testament to His grace that would be heedlessly risky in any other hands.
That He would give us the very things we crave, the very ends we worshiped before, and THEN show Himself to be the X factor by Whom all good things come because we trust that He can bless more, this is both steady and audacious.
Yet, we latch onto verse 11. We crop the picture we keep in our mind's eye. We cut out the preceding reality that His ultimate good toward us is often the stuff of decades, if not centuries, rather than a quick fix.
Yet our jubilance when He grants that the moment is comfortable, we crowd out verse 12. Call on Him? I don't remember that. I just remember the page flip of circumstances changing. Prayer? It is drowned out in our recollections by the upbeat soundtrack of better times. The silently revolutionary reality that we are and were listened to by God Himself? His presents often make more of an impact than His Presence.
Maybe as we tell and retell our story, we need frequent reenacting of Jeremiah 29:13. At one point, Christian, He filled our hearts as all in all. He WAS our first love, so consuming that we forgot our previous infatuations.
As was frequently the narrative with the Israelites, He showered us with demonstrations of His love, from a network of human supports to supplementing material comforts. Recognizing that our hearts adhere to the demonstrations and edit our narrative accordingly, there is an active part and ongoing tense to verse 13.
There's a discipline, beloved. We will seek and find Him, not just as a one-time Rescuer, when we search for Him with ALL our hearts. Give thanks for the stuff, but keep it from blocking the wellspring of our ultimate hope. Give thanks for the friends and colleagues, but let not the quest for the next one distract us from insisting on knowing more of Him.
Any credentials He might grant, any accumulated respect He might use for us to persuade others toward a better path, wonder of wonders! Yet, our most compelling aspect will be our ongoing zeal, hunger and thirst for the most of Himself He will allow us to experience.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer keeps stirring us up in the best sense. “While it is good that we seek to know the Holy One," he allows in God Is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas, "it is probably not so good to presume that we ever complete the task.”
I typically tell a pretty streamlined story of deepening faith. I met Rock Bottom having failed as a teacher in three different impoverished settings. I, consciously or not, foisted myself on these communities as the Great White Hope. The Lord repeatedly exposed the difference between condescension and true compassion, between recognizing mutual brokenness between Helper and Helped and the pedantic overcompensation I mustered again and again.
Pushing thirty, my lofty sense of myself butted daily against making minimum wage in a computer lab. It was then that I began to realize by God's grace what I was hungry for. With time and bandwidth to spare, I began to dig into God's Word. By that renewing grace, I resolved two things: (1) I would read the Bible every day whether I felt like it or not. (2) If the King of the Universe spoke to me, I would write it down.
I did, and I have truly never been the same. These disciplines as much as any professional retooling have given me purpose and passion. His Word which God exalts above His Name is so much more the key to life He grants than is the human understanding He tells us not to lean on. The true Happily Ever After is that since those days I have been in the Bible, writing, reflecting, refining my thinking almost every morning. I have, by the grace of that discipline, seen new days differently, with the sun of His mercy rising on each one.
Here's the thing: looking back, Rock Bottom doesn't seem so low. Even there, I recognize His prevailing grace and mercy in retrospect. As God likes patterns, He suggests this might be so in Jeremiah 29:11-13. Look at the position of the unmistakable THEN that leads off verse 12.
That word recasts the scope of the grace and mercy in the famous verse before it. Peace? He gives it. Protected by Him from despair, and from any true want because of Social Security Disability, and also vision and advocacy of a Vocational Rehabilitation counselor who bucked policy norms and fought to use her agency's funding for training beyond the Masters degree I already had, I had time to reflect on my next move.
Enrolled in a Masters program in Rehabilitation Counseling, He literally surrounded me with people who made a profession and professorships out of future and hope. Working with other adults, I got to see myself reflected back as something other than a feckless and pretentious teacher in the eyes of some kids who didn't have many other models. I realize with the passing of years that I was still an awkward adolescent myself. Irrespective of age, I had a lot to learn.
I plugged into the idea that my story, harrowing for me, if not in comparison to the ups and downs of some other people's experiences, could be used to help inspire and instruct others. There is a potential false gospel there, though. It is at least as ominous as an addict's potential drug relapse.
I could have found my meaning in new friends, new credentials, an alternate sense of professional effectiveness. I could have, in those reflective moments the computer lab granted, simply switched idols.
That I, granted peace and not evil, a hope and a future, in keeping with Jeremiah 29:12 reached the THEN of a heart renewed in Him rather than another go on the human services carousel is a testament to His grace that would be heedlessly risky in any other hands.
That He would give us the very things we crave, the very ends we worshiped before, and THEN show Himself to be the X factor by Whom all good things come because we trust that He can bless more, this is both steady and audacious.
Yet, we latch onto verse 11. We crop the picture we keep in our mind's eye. We cut out the preceding reality that His ultimate good toward us is often the stuff of decades, if not centuries, rather than a quick fix.
Yet our jubilance when He grants that the moment is comfortable, we crowd out verse 12. Call on Him? I don't remember that. I just remember the page flip of circumstances changing. Prayer? It is drowned out in our recollections by the upbeat soundtrack of better times. The silently revolutionary reality that we are and were listened to by God Himself? His presents often make more of an impact than His Presence.
Maybe as we tell and retell our story, we need frequent reenacting of Jeremiah 29:13. At one point, Christian, He filled our hearts as all in all. He WAS our first love, so consuming that we forgot our previous infatuations.
As was frequently the narrative with the Israelites, He showered us with demonstrations of His love, from a network of human supports to supplementing material comforts. Recognizing that our hearts adhere to the demonstrations and edit our narrative accordingly, there is an active part and ongoing tense to verse 13.
There's a discipline, beloved. We will seek and find Him, not just as a one-time Rescuer, when we search for Him with ALL our hearts. Give thanks for the stuff, but keep it from blocking the wellspring of our ultimate hope. Give thanks for the friends and colleagues, but let not the quest for the next one distract us from insisting on knowing more of Him.
Any credentials He might grant, any accumulated respect He might use for us to persuade others toward a better path, wonder of wonders! Yet, our most compelling aspect will be our ongoing zeal, hunger and thirst for the most of Himself He will allow us to experience.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer keeps stirring us up in the best sense. “While it is good that we seek to know the Holy One," he allows in God Is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas, "it is probably not so good to presume that we ever complete the task.”
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