“Howdy!  How are you?”  Students, how many times have you had that exchange in the last week?  Non-students, how many times have you experienced a similar exchange?  The “Howdy” part was easy for me, when I moved to College Station five years ago this week.  The “How are you?” part has always felt a little strange.  I am guessing this is the same for you because of all the various responses that I’ve heard to that question.  Some of them have been, “Great!” “OK” “Fine” “Alright” “Terrible” “If I were any better I’d have to be twins” to which we always answer, “That’s good.”  My favorite has had a couple of come backs over the generations.  When asked, “How are you?” occasionally I hear the response, “It’s all good!”

Last week we began a series of sermons entitled, “Fish Food for Everyone”.  The series is devoted to our nearly 10,000 fish, first year students, who have moved into our community.  We were reminded last week that it doesn’t take being a freshman to be encountering new experiences or to sense that away from home feeling.  I shared that being the parent of a fish, a first year student, can in fact, feel very new.  For many of us this is a new turn in life’s journey and the road can look pretty unfamiliar.  That’s why today I want to talk about Providence for a New Turn.  This sense of Providence gives us the confidence to respond to that sometimes awkward question, “How are you?” with a brief, but honest, “It’s all good.”

The prophet Jeremiah was in need of this sense of providence as much as anyone.  He was just a boy when God called him to be prophet and he even tried to get out of the job because of his age.  However, God told him that he had been called before he was born.  It was truly his destiny.  “Besides,” God assured, “I will be with you and will even put my words in your mouth.”  So Jeremiah was a prophet in a very difficult time for the tiny nation of Judah.  Babylon had invaded their land and taken their king and many of their intellectuals into exile in 598 B.C.  In place of King Jehoiachin, the empire set a puppet king, Zedekiah, in charge.  He would last about 12 years before he too would be taken into exile, blinded for trying to run away.  Suffice it to say, times were not good, but they were not hopeless.  It was an unfamiliar stretch of road, but it was not a stretch of futility.  Listen to what God spoke through Jeremiah to the first wave of exiles.  We will focus only on three verses, Jeremiah 29:11-13.  Hear now the Word of the Lord:

¹¹For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. ¹²Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. ¹³When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart.

This is the word of God for the people of God.  In this passage Jeremiah assured his readers that God’s plan for God’s people was all good.  Of course, there is a difference between saying, “every thing is good” and “it’s all good.”  One speaks of particulars and the other speaks of purpose.  There are particular things that we experience in life that not all the faith in the world would affirm as good.  Bad stuff happens and sometimes we feel terrible.  Every thing is not good, but it’s all good.  The entire journey is guided by a God who never stops caring for us.  The Israelites were in a bad situation.  They had been forced out of the comfort of their own homes and marched into exile.  Nevertheless, God assured them that no matter how foreign the present land seemed to them, he had plans for them that were good.  How do we keep a mentality that it’s all good when we may feel as desperate as fish out of water?  There are three suggestions that I would make based on these three verses: Don’t stop believing, don’t stop praying, and don’t stop seeking.
 

Don’t stop believing.

The Israelites seemed out of faith.  Their country had been invaded.  Their king had been taken.  The people of God had become the prisoners of Babylon.  Psalm 137 paints a powerful picture of their pain when the psalmist wrote, “By the rivers of Babylon – there we sat and there we wept when we remembered Zion.”  They were homesick and simply couldn’t go home.  Jeremiah assured them that the Lord had plans for them.  The Master’s plan was for their welfare – the Hebrew word used here is a familiar one – shalom, peace, rest, wholeness.  Remember God’s peace is not simply the absence of war or conflict, it is the overflowing presence of wholeness, warmth, comfort.  Though they were going through a time of exile that would be long enough for them to build houses, plant vineyards, marry, and have children; they were not forever banished from their land.  They would return and it would be all good. The Lord had plans for a future with hope.  The Hebrew word translated “hope” is another curious Hebrew word.  It literally means “cord” or “rope”.  The word, tiqvah, first appears in Joshua 2 when Rahab placed a scarlet tiqvah, cord or rope, in her window so that when Jericho was overthrown she and her family would be spared.  What a picture of hope in time of chaos.  The walls came tumbling down, but the house with the tiqvah in the window remained intact.  Of course, when I discovered that this word, tiqvah, meant cord or rope, I thought of the many times when I feel as though I am at the end of my rope.  God’s promise was that the plan for God’s people is for shalom (peace) and a future with tiqvah (hope). Don’t stop believing.

I have to admit, I can’t say, “don’t stop believing” without thinking of “a small town girl livin’ in a lonely world.”  The 1981 song with this title is the most downloaded song from the iTunes music store.  I wonder why this is.  Could it be the amazing tune by Journey?  It is pretty good.  Could it be the story line of this girl and a big city boy from south Detroit running into each other when they were running from life on a midnight train goin’ anywhere? It could be though the song makes no guarantees, “Some will win and some will lose.”  I think it’s the frequent expression of the negative imperative, “Don’t stop believin’” 

There is something in our soul that longs to continue to believe. God put that there.  Jeremiah began his book of oracles with a remembrance of the Lord.  He wrote in chapter 2, “Thus says the Lord: I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride…Israel was holy to the Lord…”  God has a divine plan for you to be in relationship with God.  There are times when that may be easier to believe than others.  There are those times when nothing seems to be going right in life and there is no way that we can say, “Every thing is good.”  However, God’s assurance is Providence for this new turn.  Providence that assures us, “It’s all good.”  Don’t stop believing.   The second suggestion I have for those feeling very much like fish in your new experiences, on this unfamiliar stretch of life’s journey is…
 

Don’t stop Praying.

It is so easy to stop praying.  There are all sorts of reasons that people do.  Things may be going so well that we simply begin to believe that we are doing alright on our own.  Things may be going so poorly that we either are too angry with God and the injustice of life, or quit believing in a Divine Being who would allow such atrocities.  There may be contrary evidence to the concept of God in which we have always believed.  I remember believing that if I prayed fervently enough and believed with every ounce of my soul that God would do something, it would be done. It only took a few deaths in the Emergency Room where I was serving as chaplain, for me to begin to doubt in that God.  Then I discovered the wonderful imagery of Paul Tillich, a 20^th century theologian, of a God beyond God.  His was a teaching that our concept of God is always limited because we are limited.  As such we will overlay or project on the concept of God some of our hopes, cultural biases, wishes, and even prejudices.  But there is always a God beyond God, a Divine Other that exists outside of our hopes, wishes, and projections.

Perhaps that’s what bothered the Israelites so much.  The charge brought against them was that they stopped praying.  Jeremiah 2:11 expresses this when the Lord said through the prophet, “Has a nation changed its god, even though they are no gods?”  The divine claim is that other nations hold onto their gods that are not even gods; but Israel, who had been worshipping the one true God who rescued them and redeemed them, has exchanged their God, and started praying to other gods.  One commentator, J. A. Thompson, noted that the other gods were more pliable.  They were created to serve us.  The next verse in Jeremiah says, “My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.” In an agricultural setting, this is unimaginable that a farmer would leave a land that has a living spring, and then go a land where he has to dig cisterns to catch the rain water, and the cistern leaks!

The remedy is expressed in verse 12 of our scripture for today, “when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you.” Don’t stop praying.  God hears, even through all the layers that we may have placed on God, God still hears.  The third suggestion for this new part of your journey is…
 

Don’t stop Seeking.

In the old, familiar setting it was sometimes easy to know where we can find God.  The Israelites were not in a familiar place.  They were in a strange land.  Ever since the time of Jacob, people thought and perhaps still think that God is geographically limited.  In Genesis 28, Jacob was running for his life after cheating his brother out of the blessing.  When he left the familiar and crossed over into the foreign the last one he expected to find was God.  Yet there he was coming to Jacob in a dream.  When Jacob awoke, he built and altar and said in verse 16, “Surely the Lord was in this place and I did not know it.”

Have you ever been to that place?  I have - last weekend, in fact.  Tammy and I knew that we were facing an unfamiliar place when we took our last child to college in San Marcos.  The empty nest has been looming over us for years.  Tammy decided that a good way to deal with that was not to go home after the “drop off”, but instead for us to attend a marriage retreat, entitled Marriage Encounter.  Now I have nothing against marriage retreats.  We have attended a number of them during our 32 years of marriage.  However, I was not sure that this was a good way to enter the empty nest.  Emotions could be a little raw, and the word “Encounter” sounded like there was going to be some emotional intensity.  There might even be confrontation.  I suggested, “Another time.”  But Tammy asked again if I was sure that I did not want to attend this weekend.  I’m not the most astute human being on the planet, but I do know that if your spouse mentions more than once the opportunity to participate in a marriage retreat, anything other than a “yes” could be met with, “methinks thou protests too much.”  We went and quite frankly, I felt like a hostage.  The retreat was 44 hours long and I started counting down almost immediately, “Only 43 ½ hours to go.”  Then somewhere around hour 18, Friday afternoon, it happened.  I found God there.  The weekend had frequent breaks when we were to separate and write our responses to an assigned question and come together to share our responses.  There was a rhythm to the exercise – pray first, affirm your spouse in the first paragraph, then respond to the question as openly as possible.  I prayed (for the time to pass more quickly), I wrote a paragraph of affirmation to Tammy (not a difficult task – she’s wonderful), and then I read the question, “What are some reasons for you to go on living?”

All of a sudden I had this image of a Judge sitting on the bench and I was the defendant being summoned to come before the Judge.  The Judge looks at me sternly and asks the question, “What are some reasons for you to go on living?”  Only the Judge elaborated in my mind, “You have complained every hour of this retreat.  You fuss and fume when things don’t go right.  You lament over the church not growing as fast as you think it should.  You worry about your kids being away from home.  You fret about the empty nest.  What are some reasons for you to go on living?” 

Tears began to flow as I wrote my responses to that question, “I guess the first reason is love.  I love my wife, even if I have complained about her taking me hostage this weekend (and I started to list all the things I love about her.  I love my children and want to be the loudest fan in the stands as I watch their future form.  I love this church.  I want to go on living to become the most effective pastor that I can be.”

“Surely the Lord was in this place and I did not know it.”  Jeremiah assured those who had been taken hostage to Babylon as exiles, “When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart.”  God is in this place, not only in this sanctuary, but in every square inch of the university across the street, the college across town, the public and private schools throughout this community, and in every office building and worksite.  Don’t stop seeking.

God has a plan for your life – a good plan – and though every thing is not good, it’s all good.  Wherever you are in your journey, whether it be the familiar path of a tenured professor or the foreign path of a fish; don’t stop believing, don’t stop praying, don’t stop seeking.  Oh yes, and when someone asks you this week, “How are you?”  Go ahead and tell them, “It’s all good.”  Amen.