“Seek the LORD and his strength, seek his face continually.”
— 1 Chronicles 16:11 (King James Version)
You know the feeling. It's 6:40 on a gray morning, the coffee hasn't landed yet, and already the day is asking too much — an email you've been dreading, a bill that doesn't add up, a phone call you keep meaning to make. You reach for your phone the way you reach for a light switch, scrolling for something, anything, to steady the ground under your feet. We are all, in some quiet way, looking for something. The question is never whether we seek. It is what.
That single word — "continually" — is the one that catches. Not once, not on Sundays, not only in the emergency. Again and again, like breathing. St. Augustine of Hippo, the fourth-century bishop who wandered through ambition, restlessness, and every pleasure he could find before turning toward God, put his whole autobiography into one famous confession: our hearts are restless until they rest in God. He had chased everything else first. What he learned was that the ache we feel is not a defect — it is a compass. The restlessness is the seeking, pointed home.
And here is the mercy hidden in the verse: we are told to seek His strength. You do not have to arrive already strong. You come exactly as tired as you are. Blaise Pascal, the brilliant seventeenth-century mathematician and believer, understood the human heart's hollow — that space nothing temporary can fill. He saw that the very hunger driving us from thing to thing was meant to drive us upward. To seek is not to fail; it is to be honest about your need.
Teresa of Ávila, the sixteenth-century Spanish reformer who taught ordinary souls to pray, offered a picture worth carrying: God is not far off to be hunted down, but near — a friend to be turned toward, again and again, in the middle of the dishes and the deadlines. Seeking "his face" is simply that turning.
So today, don't wait for a quiet hour that may never come. Turn once, now, in the car line, at the desk, on the walk. Then turn again. That repeated, ordinary looking-upward is not weakness. It is where the strength you're missing has been waiting all along.
A Prayer for Today
Lord, I am seeking — for steadiness, for strength, for You. Meet me in the small turnings of this ordinary day, and let my restless heart find its rest in Your nearness. Teach me to look for Your face again and again, until seeking becomes as natural as breath. Amen.