How Soccer Socks and Broken Cisterns Taught Me What Pursuit Looks Like

With boys in sports, approximately 35 percent of my job is looking for uniform parts and pieces—soccer shin guards, trusty golf gloves, and ever-evasive water bottles. As much as I try to be that mom who anticipates their gear needs, I have yet to arrive. And so, on many practice and game days, our plans to leave the house are held hostage by search and rescue efforts. Navy blue soccer sock, once again, you have eluded us.

Yet, there are also those times when the items my child needs for practice “hide” atop his dresser. Right there. In plain sight.

Sometimes, what we’re searching for is right in front of us.

Sometimes, it takes a little more diligence.

And I think searching for Jesus is both, at the same time.

For years, I loved Jesus without looking for Him. I moved my feet to church and offered my hands to serve, but my heart remained unaware of how very close He was. I didn’t understand what it meant to seek and find Jesus truly, and I didn’t grasp that seeking Him is ongoing. I found Jesus when I was five. That was the seeking part, right?

But now, as I commit so many minutes of my weeks to hunting various boy-related items, I hold an altogether different picture of what daily seeking (and finding) looks like.

And I guess I’ll say it out loud: Sometimes, my patterns and habits of searching in other areas of my life (hello, soccer socks) keep me from seeking God the way I want to.

So when I read Jeremiah 2, I see a caution. God says that his people had forsaken Him, the fountain of living waters, and instead “hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13, ESV).

They knew they needed water – and they clearly searched hard for it! But in choosing to search elsewhere, they turned from God as their provider. Instead, they found themselves in the wrong places, settling for inferior sources that didn’t meet their needs.

As a general rule, humans are searchers. Since 1987, Bono, the lead singer of U2 (one of my all-time fave bands), has been singing about hearts that still haven’t found what they’re looking for.

Part of the issue, though, is that we can get confused about what it is we’re actually searching for.

I’ve found myself digging in the wrong places, and sadly, even fooled myself into believing that the dirty, contaminated water I found would satisfy me. How many broken cisterns have I looked to for love, belonging, and comfort?

Mary Leakey, a renowned paleoanthropologist (you know, someone who did actual archaeological digging), said of searching, “We only find what we’re looking for.”

Given how we tend to dig these counterfeit cisterns, I suppose I agree with that – but I far prefer how C.S. Lewis wrote of the same sentiment: “For all find what they truly seek.” (The Last Battle, Chronicles of Narnia)

What we pursue, we find.

While Leakey’s observation feels discouraging, Lewis’s offers hope. The familiarity in Lewis’s words brings comfort as they wrap around a repeated promise we read in Deuteronomy and Jeremiah and Psalms and Luke and Acts and so many other places: “You will find Him if you seek the Lord with all your heart and with all your soul.” (Deuteronomy 4:29)

It’s a promise. We find what we truly seek. Broken cisterns. Or Living Water.

So, before we become desperate in those dry, wandering moments, we can choose to seek Living Water.

Throughout scripture, we see how God pursues the whole of us. The souls of us. In His kindness, God also lays out how to pursue Him in Deuteronomy 4:29 – a verse then repeated by Jesus in the Gospels as the Greatest Commandment. We can’t overstate how much this verse matters to God. When we examine the original Hebrew, we gain greater clarity around what pursuing God looks like:

“You will find Him if you seek the Lord with all your heart and with all your soul.”

• Seek: bāqaš, which means “seek in order to find, to secure”
• All: kōl, which means “the whole of”
• Heart: lēḇāḇ, which means the “inner man, including our will, mind, conscience, understanding, soul”
• Soul: nepeš, which means “that which breaths, the breathing substance or being”
• Find: māṣā’, which means “to secure, meet, encounter”

If we piece each of these phrases from the Hebrew together, it might read something like:

“When we seek God in order to find Him with the whole of our inner breath-filled selves, we will meet Him.”

God created within us a longing and desire to find Him (Ecclesiastes 3:11, Acts 17:27). St. Augustine said, “…our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.” (The Confessions) Broken cisterns won’t satisfy us. To find our rest in Him, we hold fast to pursuing Jesus first and only, with the whole of our inner breath-filled selves.

What we truly seek – with commitment and unshakable belief in the outcome – we find. When our pursuit of Jesus begins with a full-hearted, wide-awake seeking, we will meet Him.

We find Jesus waiting inside our faith-fueled resolve that we will.

“You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13, ESV).