“You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you,” declares the LORD, “… and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile” (Jeremiah 29:13-14).

Exile is either the end of the road … or the place for an unexpected, undeserved new creation.

Exile is the loss of everything we’ve ever known and loved … or the place where, having lost everything we have ever known and loved, we find ourselves found, and still loved, by God.

Exile is where we will abandon our real identity altogether … or find it afresh.

The critical question, whether we are at home or in exile, is Will we seek the Lord?  Will we seek God himself, for himself alone, and will we do so with all our hearts?

We don’t earn anything by seeking the Lord; instead, we receive everything we need to love and serve the Lord, as we seek him with all our hearts.

Israel had so many Real ID markers: God’s covenant, God’s Law, God’s Promised Land; the God-ordained Davidic monarchy and the God-inhabited Temple; the long story of God seeking and making for himself a people; a thick collection of the deepest promises.  In Exile, it all gets broken apart, stripped away.  How can we sing the songs of Zion while strangers in a strange land?

What is left?  Who are we now?  We are a people who seek the Lord.  With all of our hearts.

Apart from the Lord himself, covenant, Law, Temple, King and all the rest are empty, vacant, void.  They were only ever designed and graciously given as “containers” for the grace and presence of God.  But even when they are torn from us, the Lord remains.  We can seek him.  And he promises he will be found by us, when we seek him with all our hearts.

To seek is to desire deeply.  To attend to carefully.  To respond to whole-heartedly.  To go on a journey that, impossibly, starts at the end of the road.

A people who seek God with all their hearts, even when already far past the end of the road, will be found by God.  And having been found by God, even in the farthest exile, even in the most seemingly God-forsaken place, they will find themselves, they will be found by their Real ID, named with their true name: sought by God.

Take a moment: jot down the two or three most important gifts that God has offered you during our Real ID journey thus far.