Looking for God in all the Wrong Places

Looking for God in all the Wrong Places

According to “an unimpeachable source,” and my “go-to” for quick information that is probably correct, Wikipedia, “Lookin’ for Love [in all the Wrong Places] is a song written by Wanda Mallette, Bob Morrison and Patti Ryan, and recorded by American country music singer Johnny Lee. It was released in June 1980 as part of the soundtrack to the film Urban Cowboy, released that year.” Listen to it at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mxIHL6d-RM&gt;

As some of you will remember, and based on uncorroborated information from the aforementioned “unimpeachable source,” the movie, Urban Cowboy, claimed by some critics to be a country music version of Saturday Night Fever, told a tale of Bud and Sissy (John Travolta and Debra Winger) who, along with many other young twenty-somethings, inhabited Mickey Gilley’s bar, Gilley’s, in Pasadena, Texas. May I submit that the redeeming social value of the hackneyed plot (boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back) is the basic premise that people are always looking for love (or Something Like It, in the words of the 1978 Kenny Rogers song of the same name.) However, all too frequently, we people tend to look for such love in all the wrong places, at times, leading us to being thrown by and subsequently struck being with bone-breaking force by, a mechanical bull as did Bud in the movie.

By now, I suspect that you expect that what will follow is a sermonette about seeking God as true love instead of all the things the earth has to offer – and, you’d be wrong. Please refer back to the title of the piece, Looking for GOD in all the Wrong Places. May I explain?

My morning habit includes three cups of coffee interspersed between headline articles in the New York Times, AP News, and BBC News. I cap these off with AL.COM for local flavor. Thus, by nine o’clock, I’m thoroughly caffeine-buzzed yet strangely depressed. I do not recommend this as a good routine in which to engage before your daily Bible study and prayer time. However, the other day, a notion worked its way into my head that I should reconsider not my news-reading, but what I did with the news I read. What if instead of asking the mental question, “What have these idiots done today,” I ask the question, “What has GOD done today?” What if every day I search, not for the news of the day, but for God in the news and in the lives of people?

Jesus said, “My Father is always at work.” John 5:17. Always. – not Do I suggest that God causes everything in the news? No, I do not. I am not a fatalist, not even a Calvinist, (though I do admit to fatalistic tendencies sometimes.) Do I believe that God is surprised by the things that transpire in the news? Again, no, though I joke that some things are so “off the wall” that they cause one to wonder. I submit that people have choices, and choices have consequences. It appears that the consequences make for good reading in the news. May I further submit that some people like to read about a good train-wreck sometimes. That’s why God made NASCAR and bubble-headed starlets (with or without talent.)

Even in those tongue-in-cheek examples, and even in all the wrong places, God is working. We just have to look for the evidence of such work. Perhaps, in the long-run, that’s a much more rewarding and profitable enterprise.

As I think on the subject, my conclusion is that many times, while it may be a good exercise to see the evidence of God at work in national and international affairs, there’s probably not much we can or should do about it. However, occasionally, perhaps, more than occasionally, we find God doing something in which we should involve ourselves.

An expanded reading of John 5:17 quotes Jesus “In his defense, Jesus said to them, ‘My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.” “I, too am working,” hmm, Jesus was always working because the Father was always working, and Jesus was His Father’s Son, was He not. That’s just what Jesus did, and may I submit that is what he calls “we people” to do as well.  Are we not the Father’s sons and daughters (at least, by adoption) as well? 

I am quite fond of quoting Henry Blackaby in Experiencing God: Knowing and Doing the Will of God (1990) for the proposition that the call placed upon the lives of Christians is to emulate the life of Jesus, not least in that facet of seeking out and finding what God is doing and then joining in. Such occupation may be dangerous, look where it led Jesus, the Twelve Apostles, the Apostle Paul, and countless others. Nonetheless, it will never be dull because God is, in fact, always doing something and something that counts in a spiritual sense.

Perhaps, that’s the key to happiness and blessedness. May God grant me the vision to see Himself at work in the world amidst all the evil, the understanding, on a carrier wave in the background above all the noise and distraction, to realize how I am to join Him in His work, and the courage,  just about, but not quite, overwhelmed by a myriad of strangling emotions to “Just Do it! Swoosh!”

So let it be written, so let it be done.