Finding the Harbor

Acts 17:22–31

Phrases that spoke to me today:
• so that people might seek God, even perhaps grope for him and find him
• he is not far from any one of us
• "What therefore you unknowingly worship, I proclaim to you"
• "In him we live and move and have our being"

Applying the Word to My Life:
How many things have you tried in your life thinking that they would make you happy, give you peace or both? The search lies under nearly everything we do and each person spends a good part of their life trying to navigate to that harbor. One of the big ones for me has been my career. I have spent a lot of time and energy becoming the best lawyer I can be and building my career. It has provided money to support my family and more control over my day. But when I look back, I can safely say that my career has not brought me happiness and peace.

I knew something was still missing, but I didn't really know what it was until I started working in youth ministry and meeting the other people doing the same. I still didn't know what it was, but I knew they had that thing I was looking for. They brought peace and joy with them and it wasn't coming from any of the other things I had tried. They weren't further along the path I was on — they were on a different path entirely.

Paul's experience is almost the mirror image. Alive with Christ he walks into Athens where Christ is still pretty much unknown. As he walks through the city he is aware enough to see a city full of people who are genuinely searching — much like I was. They have built altars. They have spent real time and real resources reaching toward something they can feel but cannot name. He even finds the one that stops him: To an Unknown God.

Paul knows what this is. He has been searching before too. He was relentlessly pursuing a path that he thought was holy and would provide happiness. Instead, he learned that all that time and energy had been spent persecuting God's people instead of serving God Himself. Through his lived experience Paul can say: I know what this is. What you have been reaching toward without a name — I can tell you who He is.

Throughout all of history, and continuing to today, the world we live in is full of altars. If what you have doesn't bring the peace you expected, go get more. If the pleasure didn't last, find more of it. More money, more achievement, more control, more comfort. The altar keeps getting built — more elaborate, more expensive, more urgent — because something real is being sought but never seems to get nearer. Like Paul's wasted zeal — the search is not wrong, the direction is.

The search is almost never random. God set the frame of human experience — the times, the boundaries — so that people would seek Him. Even when we do not know what we are looking for, our longing itself is pointed somewhere real. But if we don't step back to understand the foundation of that desire, our search will take us further rather than closer to its fulfillment. Paul says it plainly: he is not far from any one of us. In him we live and move and have our being. We are already inside what we are searching for. We just don't have a name for it yet.

The symptoms of a search that isn't finding what it needs are not hard to recognize. Anger. Despair. Hopelessness. A kind of frantic energy that keeps doubling down on what isn't working. These are not signs of failure — they are signs of hunger. Someone in the grip of those things is not an obstacle. They are a person building an altar and waiting for someone to tell them what it is for.

That is the disciple's opportunity. Not to stand above the altar and pass judgment, but to sit beside it and say: I know this feeling. And I found a name for it.

Which brings the question back to us. Before we can recognize the altar in someone else, we have to be honest about where we are still building one ourselves. There are places in most of us where the search is still misdirected — where we are pouring real energy into something that cannot give us what only He can. Those places point us in the direction that growth is most needed and where peace is nearest.

Where in my life am I still building the altar?

My Response for Today:
Today I will name one place where I am looking for peace in a direction that cannot deliver it.