Hear my voice when I call, LORD; be merciful to me and answer me. My heart says of you, “Seek his face!” Your face, LORD, I will seek. Do not hide your face from me, do not turn your servant away in anger; you have been my helper. Do not reject me or forsake me, God my Savior. … I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living. Wait for the LORD; be strong and take heart and wait for the LORD. (Psalm 27:7-9,13-14)

Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, the first day of the season of Lent. This year, Pastor Michael and I will be doing something different for Lent in these devotionals. Rather than writing out our own devotional reflections, we will be letting the scriptures speak for themselves in a more meditative way. As Pastor Michael’s devotion spoke of yesterday, we will invite you to meditate on, to savour Scripture. More on that tomorrow. For now, another devotion in preparation that invites us into this new Lenten practice of “seeking God’s face.”

This is the phrase we are given in Psalm 27. “My heart says of you, ‘Seek his face!’ Your face, Lord, I will seek.” I wonder how often this statement of the Psalmist is true for us. How often do the longings of our heart attach themselves to seeking the face—that is, the presence—of God?

I think we find that our longings attach themselves far more often to lesser things. Things like we talked about on Sunday: keeping up our metrics and streaks on our devices; attending to health and fitness regimes; climbing ladders and accruing resources; allowing our eyes to caress the physical and digital bodies we encounter; becoming information junkies on politics, sports, or the weather.

Some of these things I just listed off are things you might recognize to be wrong, but others you might see as quite ordinary and benign. The Christian tradition has long recognized that even very good things—like our families—can become idols. Each of them, when pursued beyond certain healthy boundaries, carry the possibility of reorienting our desires and the longings of our hearts away from the Creator to the created. These lesser things, when pursued as ends in themselves, only leave us longing for more.

Sports are great. Beauty and relationships are great. Games are fun. Work is fruitful and can be quite meaningful too. Social media is a wonderful tool of connection. But they are, all of them, meant to be received as gifts of God that draw our eyes and attention to Him. None of them are ends in themselves. If we treat them as such, we’ll only find our senses dulled and our hearts broken.

Our senses and our seeking were created to find their fulfillment and joy in the face and presence of God. The longing, the aching emptiness, the restless striving we feel in this life, are the cries of our heart to “seek his face!” Against these same restless longings, Psalm 27 chooses not to fill the God-shaped hole in our souls with some lesser, created thing. Instead, in a step of faith, the Psalmist turns the heart’s cry of longing into a movement of the soul, mind, and body: a daring act of attention to God—seeking his face in prayer. And then the Psalmist turns around and invites us to join too. To turn away from whatever lesser things we may have been occupying ourselves with to give our attention instead to the Lord. The invitation is to wait on him in confidence that we will see his face and his goodness yet, here in the land of the living. This promise of hope is all the more true in Jesus Christ.

So today and into our Lenten journey to come, turn your attention to God. Seek his face. “Wait for the LORD; be strong and take heart and wait for the LORD.”