Jeremiah 29:13 Meaning You Shall Seek Me

Half-hearted seeking finds nothing, and that is mercy, not cruelty. The heart that keeps one hand on its old comforts is really looking for a smaller thing, and the smaller thing is all it gets. The disease is a divided wanting; the cure is to gather the whole self into one longing and pour it in a single direction.

This is spoken as a promise, and the promise holds. To the one who searches with everything, the One being searched for is already the searcher's own deepest pull, the treasure that set the digging in motion before the shovel ever moved.

Wholeness is the only condition. A person searching with half of himself is really two people, one moving toward and one keeping the return ticket in his pocket, and that search can continue for a lifetime without touching anything.

Totality changes the arithmetic. When every part of someone pours in one direction, the seeker is used up in the seeking, and nobody remains standing apart, waiting to be handed a result. What was being looked for shows itself then as the ground under the whole restless movement, not as something waiting further along the road.