Sitting next to me, book in hand, her troubled voice uttered
words that felt as if she had glimpsed my very core, “ Mama, I’m looking for
Jesus. I can’t find Jesus. Where’s Jesus?”
Cecily was looking for a story about Jesus but her words
described how I so often feel. In the fleeing hours between when my head leaves
the pillow until it drops again in sleep, I long to see Jesus in all the
moments that encompass my day. I long for what I have known. It’s not that in
the knowing, those days were filled with ease, delight and happiness. It was
that in my spirit, the Spirit was present and call me crazy, but I knew.
Once you’ve known, nothing else is satisfying.
When Cecily spoke those words, I was sitting, Word in hand,
breathing words that in the few moments that I sat, I would find grounding;
that I would find Jesus. That in the days moments ahead, I would know the
Spirit as it worked through my hand, spoke from my lips, and changed the
direction of my heart.
Cecily spoke again, “ There’s lots of Jesus! I found Jesus.
I wuv Jesus.”
There’s a lot of Jesus, present in the Spirit given. I need those daily moments of stopping to
allow myself to be found by the one whom I seek to become kindred to. The one who has always been
there. May it become that I am always easy to find. May we be kindred.
“I am beginning now to see how radically the character of my spiritual journey will change when I no longer think of God as hiding out and making it difficult as possible for me to find [God], but, instead, as the one who is looking for me while I am doing the hiding.”