Sought Him and Did Not Find Him

The notebook is a real notebook and that is the part he is not proud of.

It started as a way of being serious about it. Two winters ago, when the thing first would not lift, he began writing down what he tried and what happened afterward, in the way a man writes down what he has changed on an engine.

So there are entries. Early mornings versus late evenings. Standing versus sitting. Out loud versus silent. Whether it made any difference to read first and then pray, or pray and then read. A three-week experiment with a shorter passage. A fortnight where he tried a fixed hour and stuck to it exactly, which nearly killed him.

The results column is the same all the way down and he has stopped filling it in.

And the belief underneath the notebook, which he has never once written on a page because you do not write down the thing you actually believe, is this: there is a right way to do this, other people have found it, and my not finding anything means I am doing it wrong.

He is thirty-nine. He has a good marriage and two boys and a job that takes more than it gives. He is not in crisis and he is not angry.

He is just, in a very orderly way, blaming himself for a failed search and looking for the technical fault.

The one who loves most does not find Him

There is a line in the Song of Solomon that ought to end the technique question for good, because of who is speaking.

By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.Song of Solomon 3:1

This is the book in Scripture most given over to love. That is its whole subject. And the woman speaking is the one who loves; there is nobody in the passage more devoted than she is, and nobody with a better method.

She seeks. She does not find.

And the text does not diagnose her. It does not say she sought carelessly, or at the wrong hour, or in the wrong posture, or with a divided heart. It reports a fruitless search by a wholly devoted person and moves on without a word of criticism.

You have been hunting for a fault in a search that Scripture reports without one. That is not me letting you off a hook; Song of Solomon 3:1 puts seeking and not finding in the same breath and attaches no cause, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an ancient love song and lays it beside a notebook with an empty results column.

Why the notebook could never work

Now let me say the thing about the method, because you are a practical man and this is where it bites.

A method is a way of producing a result reliably. It works when the thing you are trying to produce is within your power to produce. Change the input, get the output.

But the thing you are looking for is a Person, and a Person is not an output. He is not produced by early mornings or by standing up or by a fixed hour, and no arrangement of your inputs obliges Him to arrive. That is not a defect in your technique. That is what it means for God to be somebody rather than something.

You have been running an experiment on a relationship, and no result you got could have meant what you took it to mean. The written word describes seeking without finding and never once treats it as a fault in the seeker, and the Holy Spirit is not a result that a correctly ordered morning obtains.

I want to say something else about the two winters, because there is a real cost you have not counted. The notebook has quietly taught you that everything that happens between you and God is your doing. Good session, you did something right. Nothing, you did something wrong. Two years of that and a man ends up carrying the whole relationship on his own back and calling it diligence.

You were never the mechanism, and the outcome has never been in your column. Scripture puts a devoted seeker in an empty night and passes no judgment on her, and the Holy Spirit has been the one holding a man steady through two winters of blank results.