In the early part of most anyone’s Christian life, everything is about finding. Your witness is that you found the way. Life prior to knowing Christ was all about coming up empty. You were seeking something more to life and when you found Christ, you found it. There used to be a bumper sticker that made the rounds as part of a Campus Crusade for Christ evangelistic campaign that announced, “I found it.” People were supposed to ask you what it was that you found, and that would present you with a golden opportunity to tell them how much better life is now that you are a Christian. No wonder it was so easy to assume that once you found it, the search was off. Why keep seeking when you’ve found everything in Christ? In fact, to still be seeking or questioning anything might indicate that you were unsatisfied with Christ.

But then, at some point along one’s growth, a second wave of questions comes along. Some people worry about this, thinking that they are losing their faith. Suddenly it seems some of the answers you have been using appear shallow to you. Faith may start to look too simple for life, as life becomes more and more complex. As it turns out, your life may not be that much better than it was before Christ. For some, it may be worse. Those who try to “sell” Christianity based on the success/happiness/overall well being of the final product may look like shysters based on what you now know.

I think a lot of this disappointment is due to a common misunderstanding of what it is that we find when we find Christ. We don’t find a bunch of answers, or a system of beliefs that work, or a god that is going to guarantee us everything our culture has taught us to desire. We found a relationship with God, and finding this relationship is only the beginning.

What we have found is a lifetime of learning, growing and deepening in that relationship with God. Some of that involves pain. Some involves losing. It all involves a redirecting of our lives from one way of looking at the world to another.

What makes it worthwhile is not the end product, but the fact that, all along the way, the living God—the one who will be the center of our eternity, accompanies us.

If you read the Psalms of David, what you come away with is not the triumph of David’s exemplary life, but the heart relationship with God that holds it all together through victory and defeat, joy and sorrow, friends and friendlessness, depression and elation—the presence of God and the seeming absence of God. It’s not an altogether pretty picture. It’s not what TV preachers promise. It’s what God gives. Himself. And a major part of the finding is finding out that He indeed is enough. He is everything.

That’s what you find when you “find” Christ. It’s a little like finding what you weren’t seeking, but really wanted all along.