What We Leave Behind

Over the weekend, my husband and I went gold prospecting. He bought a dry washer and was excited to be able to try it. The weather has not cooperated recently, as the rain has caused a lot of flash flooding recently. He wanted to go south, but since there was anticipated rain and an arroyo, we agreed to go north. We hit rain on the way, but it was dry by the time we arrived.

After he finished running a few hours, it started to rain again, so we packed up. He panned his concentrate and had a little gold. I encouraged him to grab a few buckets of his tailings to run in his sluice at home to make sure he wasn’t losing too much. So he made three buckets and we drove back home.

Saturday night he ended up running the tailings from his new machine. What he found let him know he needed to do some additional work with his new dry washer. He found a 0.1 gram picker in addition to the small gold he expected to find. He realized he needed to go back for the other tailing, in addition to fine tuning his machine.

As he left Sunday afternoon to go back to the tailings he left behind, I thought about how God’s Word, His Wisdom is a treasure. He encourages use to meditate on His Word, to seek Him, to seek wisdom. He wants us to pull everything we can from it, and then come back for more.

“My son, if you will receive my words And treasure my commandments within you, Make your ear attentive to wisdom, Incline your heart to understanding; For if you cry for discernment, Lift your voice for understanding; If you seek her as silver And search for her as for hidden treasures; Then you will discern the fear of the Lord And discover the knowledge of God.” Proverbs‬ ‭2:1-5‬ ‭

According to Oxford Languanges:

To seek is to attempt to find something.

The Lord wants us to dig into His Word, and He will reveal hidden treasures from it. I remember when I first started to really seek God in the Scriptures. I spent a week or more on one verse in John. Each day writing more and more of what God revealed as I meditated on the verse. I couldn’t bring myself to move to the next one until I felt like I had gotten everything He had for me from that Scripture.

So often I find myself satisfied with the revelation I receive from an initial reading of the Word. I realize much like my husband did, that I leave too much behind when I don’t take time to really meditate on the Word, to seek Him and the wisdom He so freely gives.

Unlike the pile my husband left behind, with God’s Word, what we leave behind will never change.

“The grass withers, the flower fades, But the word of our God stands forever.”” Isaiah‬ ‭40:8‬ ‭‬‬

God’s word is living. There are times that I go back to a familiar passage and can still pull more from it. The treasure is hidden, but we can always go back to what we left behind. We can share it, and it will not diminish what we have. Instead we often find by sharing, that others can add to our understanding. As we change, and go through different seasons, God will bring what we left behind to minister to us in that moment afresh.