I’ve tried connecting with God and he doesn’t answer
Persevering despite discouragement
There’s a classic line in the iconic Australian movie, The Castle, by Dale Kerrigan. “Hey Dad, I dug a hole”. The father, Darryl, is so proud of his son.
Dale is passionate about digging holes, he loves it, and you just can’t stop him!
Makes me think about our own lives. What are we passionate about? When we are so passionate about something, we’ll just keep exploring it’s potential, pushing the boundaries, and tweaking until we’ve found something special worth talking about, maybe even worth selling.
That’s what my friend Damo has done with coffee. He’s loved coffee for years, and he’s now manufactured a soda drink with coffee! Well, I saw his post and thought, “that was always gunna happen”- he was so fixated with coffee, he’s developed an idea and product worth sharing!
Friends, if you’ve tried connecting with God and got no answer, then just keep digging! The more focussed we are, the greater the dig, the more chance we’ll find something that no one else has found. You know why? Because everyone else has given up! They stopped seeking and missed out on finding the gold.
We’ve got to start somewhere! The beginner dig.
Years ago I had a message on my heart that I wanted to speak out. I never got the opportunity, being passed over as others were chosen. I could have been discouraged, and given up, instead I dug deeper and found a richer relationship with God.
As I did this, I found myself writing, and what do you know? I found some gold! Insights that I hadn’t thought of before. Eventually those burdens turned into a book, and got picked up by a publisher (which has since gone under). Ironically, the message I had wanted to share with just 100 people, turned into a few thousand through the sales of the book. It’s called, “Connecting Families with Jesus” You can buy it here.
So don’t be discouraged, if you have tried talking to God and felt he hasn’t answered you, then persevere! Maybe your prayer may require some tweaking, but keep digging! Why not try asking God, ‘whether he is there, and does he care about you’?
Now that’s a prayer that he will answer!
There’s a Proverb that says:
Tune your ears to wisdom,
and concentrate on understanding.
Cry out for insight,
and ask for understanding.
Search for them as you would for silver;
seek them like hidden treasures.
Then you will understand what it means to fear the Lord,
and you will gain knowledge of God.
Just to clarify, there are some things that we just shouldn’t be digging into, like unrighteous behaviours:
Back in the day, a guy called Paul gives a mouthful to a bunch of people from modern day Turkey. It could be fair to say they were a bunch of turkeys 🙂 “When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are very clear: sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarrelling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other sins like these. Let me tell you again, as I have before, that anyone living that sort of life will not inherit the Kingdom of God.”
Yeah, like pursuing whole-heartedly gambling houses and the like, wouldn’t be a good thing. There’s nothing like profiting from the vulnerabilities of others to get God’s goat up! That’s like a sheep breeder stealing a pet lamb from a child for his Sunday Roast. In the long run (and by that I mean eternity), we’re better off being the vulnerable person, than the profiteer-even though at the time we’d rather stick needles in our eye sockets!
To finish, Dale Kerrigan ended up digging a hole so deep that he struck water! While he hit a water pipe by accident, my prayer is that YOU keep digging until you find the source of all life, living water, that never runs dry!
Keep going, until you find living water!
