Jeremiah 29

(These are my favorite scriptures about “living in the world but not of the world.”)

This is what God said to everyone that was forced out of Jerusalem into Babylon:

Build houses and live in them. Plant roots, grow gardens, dig up the vegetable and pick the fruit and eat it, year after year. Get married, and have kids and then marry your kids off and have grandkids and surround yourself with family. Don't stop living just because this is not what you expected, don't lean into the lessness, make it more.

You live in Babylon now, so make Babylon better. Pray for it, because what’s good for Babylon is good for you now, its peace is your peace.

There are people telling you that you're going back to Jerusalem soon, that you don't need to work here, that you're going to be delivered out of this difficult place. They're lying to you. I didn't send them.

Listen: it's going to be a long time before I send you back to home. Believe me, trust me—I know what I’ve planned, and my plans are to make your life joyful and bountiful, to give you hope and things to hope in, just not the way you thought.

Eventually you'll pray, and I’ll answer. You’ll talk, I’ll listen. When you look for me with all of yourself, when you search for me with everything in you, that’s when you’ll find me. I will lead you out of your exile and gather you together again from all the places of hurt. I'll bring you home, I promise.