God is Worth Finding

I lived in Brazil until I was seven, the child of missionaries, and my earliest memories are of the ‘casa de oracąo’ (the house of prayer). I took this picture many years later, on a pilgrimage back to my first home. It takes me to another place: sitting on laps restlessly waiting for sermons to end (they never ended); listening wide-eyed as the teenage girls confided in me about boys (there were drama-filled love letters, they were Brazilian after all); and on more than one occasion, being left behind—lost in the busyness and excitement of church life.

Every day on my walk to work in Wellington, I pass by a strange, shy-looking building that immediately transports me back to my childhood. It sits nestled between an unused lot and some of the city’s sleazier bars. I happen to know it’s a church, because it shares the name ‘casa de oracąo’. But even the church looks surprised to be there. It belongs to another world, another era.

I wonder how many people walking down this busy street every day, know this is a church? And if so, do they quite naturally ask: ‘What on earth does this have to do with me?’

The answer may be ‘nothing’—and yet ‘everything’. A recent Oxford University study discovered that ‘believing in God is part of human nature’. Professor Roger Trigg, co-director of the project, found that religion is ‘not just something for a peculiar few to do on Sundays instead of playing golf … Human thought seems to be rooted in religious concepts, such as the existence of supernatural agents or gods, and the possibility of an afterlife or pre-life.’

Professor Trigg hints at why so many people struggle to embrace the very God who created us to believe in him: in our culture, faith in God has become synonymous with ‘religion’, a set of practises and regulations that keep a few ‘inside the club’ (or church) while the rest of the world gets on with living.

But a true church is simply where people who know they need God, gather together to find him. Church belongs to everyone: because everyone has the right to seek God. As the Oxford study confirms, we are hard-wired towards God—that tug on our hearts never really leaves us. Eugene Peterson (quoted by Philip Yancey in Church, Why Bother?), says: Most of us may not be able to define spirituality in a satisfactory way, but few of us fail to recognise its presence or absence … Life, life and more life—it’s our deepest hunger and thirst.

If you’re feeling that tug in your heart, ask God to show himself (or herself) to you. Try church—God is found wherever people seek him. If you feel a sense of peace, the presence of God is there with the people. If you find religion, dust it off and try somewhere else. God is worth finding.

Against all odds—as it might seem to the observer—my early church life is full of happy memories. The characters from my childhood had found life, life and more life: they had experienced the grace and peace of a generous God. Without this, it would have simply been a strange religion, in a strange land. It is this, true life—not a relic from another world—that quenches our deepest hunger and thirst.

By Ingrid Barratt (from War Cry magazine)