Have you ever gone on a God Hunt? A God Hunt begins when you teach yourself to look for God’s hand at work in the every day occurrences of your life. Here’s one of my personal God Hunt Sightings:
What is the God Hunt? Simply defined, the God Hunt is choosing to recognize God anytime he intervenes in our everyday life. It is a tool my husband and I developed decades ago to teach our four children how to experience the presence of God in their everyday activities.
We firmly believe that it is a sin to make the Christian life boring or theoretical (it is neither). In developing spiritual disciplines, or in teaching holy truth, we attempt to apply this teaching model: What is learned with pleasure is learned full measure.
The God Hunt, because of its playful quality, has been used by hundreds of thousands of seekers worldwide, people who have desired to identify God in their everyday lives but have had difficulty in doing so. Good teachers encourage play. The German poet-philosopher Friedrich Schiller wisely suggested that human beings are completely human only at play.
Scripture teaches that God is an active and communicative being, one who is present in his creation, ready to come to the aid of those who love him and eager to be in constant communion. Look at the biblical evidence. The men and women who discovered God were sheepherders, farmers, vinedressers, servant girls, slaves, fishermen, tax collectors, town whores, the sick and the dying, the wealthy, kings and commanders, religious dignitaries, the intelligentsia. No matter their status in life, they were all common folk, everyday people like you and me who had uncommon encounters. The Almighty intervened in their ordinary routines—in the desert, in the field, in the garden, by the seashore, along the river, in the town, at festivals and celebrations, during high holy days, on the Sabbath. He is where his people are, joining them in their daily lives.
Yet we moderns suffer from massive dissociative disorders—split from ourselves, divided from one another, alienated (even those of us who say we believe) from the God who loves us. Consequently we are filled with inexplicable longing to be unioned. We attempt to reason our way back to connection, but this kind of joining is best accomplished through the heart’s way of knowing, through the experience of finding and through acquaintance. The God Hunt, due to its playfulness, helps us find God in the ordinary events of living.
The God Hunt rules insist that participants take initiative to seek after the Almighty, that we humans exercise intention and look for him in the everyday, that we choose to seek him in the commonplace. Often, however, we play the game of finding God as though we were stumbling around in blind-man’s bluff. We go through the motions, bumbling and bumping, with a rag tied around our spiritual eyes, and we learn to ignore the nudges and pushes that are evidences of God participating in our everyday worlds. We become benumbed, anesthetized.
At the end of his remarkable book The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life, Dr. Armand M. Nicholi Jr., professor at Harvard, closes this posthumous dialogue between these two great minds with a quote that summarizes Lewis’s mature belief.
“We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito. And the incognito is not always easy to penetrate. The real labor is to remember to attend. In fact to come awake. Still more to remain awake.”
Finding God incognito in the world is not a ho-hum proposition. It is delight. It is joy. It is wonder. It is a childlike wiggling anticipation that somewhere, any moment, just around the next corner, when you least expect it, the Divine is going to jump out, cry “Boo!” and you are going to respond, “Gotcha!” This is wondrous, is it not? The wonder of an “I spy!”
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Award-winning author Karen Mains has long had an interest in spiritual formation and the obedient Christian walk. She has written about the God Hunt in her book by the same name, The God Hunt: The Delightful Chase and the Wonder of Being Found. A hardback copy can be ordered from Mainstay Ministries for $10.00 plus $4.95 shipping and handling. Contact Karen at info@mainstayministries.org and she will be happy to autograph a copy for you.
Karen continues to write content for her Christian blog, “Thoughts-by-Karen-Mains.” In so doing, she desires to touch the lives of Christian women and men and help them find ways to walk closer with the Lord Jesus Christ. In addition, through silent retreats, spiritual teaching, women’s retreats, Christian vacation opportunities, and other ministry activities, Karen helps each Christian woman and man receive vital spiritual food.
Through her Hungry Souls ministry, Karen serves as a spiritual coach to many Christian women and men, and teaches a mentor-writing class. And, through the Global Bag Project, she is working to develop a network of African women who sew exquisite cloth reusable shopping bags, Africa bags. This micro-finance women opportunity helps provide a much-needed sustainable income for struggling African families. For more information on this critically important project, please click here.
For decades, Karen and her husband, David, have served God through religious communications—radio, television, and print publication. They are the co-authors of the Kingdom Tales Trilogy: Tales of the Kingdom, Tales of the Resistance, and Tales of the Restoration. To find many valuable resources for pastors and congregations at the Mainstay Ministries main website, please click here.
Likewise, pastors will find special resources to help them prepare effective, life-transforming Sunday sermons by visiting David Mains’ website by clicking here.
