Finding God in the Simple Things

I can now successfully say I taught several teenagers in Cambodia how to do the Hokey Pokey. For the past couple of days, I’ve been helping lead a group focused on finding God in the simple things as part of the youth rally. We’ve been doing to the Hokey Pokey to help illustrate how we can find God in music. Music crosses all cultural boundaries and languages and connects us all. When we’re worshipping, I have no idea what the kids were saying, but I can feel the message of the song. We were all worshipping our great God together. So here I am teaching others how to look for God in the simple things and I start doing some reflecting. Here in Cambodia, I can find God in everything—the people we meet, the beautiful weather, and the lush scenery. Why is it that I struggle with this back home? I feel that I’m constantly searching for a deeper meaning. I’m trying to find God in the impossible. God can only be in the big miracles that people write books about and they eventually turn into movies. So what’s changed? I could easily say that you should all travel across the globe to experience God in the simple things, but that seems like a bit of a contradiction. The biggest thing I’ve learned from working with the youth is that God is everywhere, even in the negatives. One of the girls I interacted with today was talking about her older brother and how he’s constantly bullying her for reading the Bible. I started to think about how your family is supposed to be your biggest support system and how frustrating it must be to get insulted for your faith. She went on to explain that her brother just makes her faith stronger. She knows that her brother is just testing her. God still loves her and He is most important. We also talked about how God is with us during every step of our daily routines. He is with us when we wake up, when we’re eating breakfast, when we’re at work, when we’re sleeping, etc. But so many of us get so caught up in our busy lives that we forget who gave us this life and who is with us as we go throughout the day. So maybe I need to stop and smell the roses more often. Maybe I need to just be in the moment instead of rushing from one place to the next. God is everywhere. We worship a BIG God who can be found in the smallest and simplest of things.

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