Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.
1 Peter 5:8 (NIV)
Looking for Someone in Particular
The school cafeteria keeps cooking through the summer, lunches for a rec center a few blocks over. It’s one person’s work. There are two people in the kitchen.
The manager runs it alone the rest of the year. The other one is seventeen, hired in June for twenty hours a week, and she keeps him on the sink and the walk-in count, and on anything else that holds him along the far wall where the window is. She writes his hours up generous. When the heat gets bad she sends him out to the dock for ice nobody needs.
Be alert and of sober mind. That goes out to believers Peter calls exiles at the top of the letter, scattered across five provinces, and the reason arrives with it: your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Someone. A lion looking for someone is looking for one person, and Peter doesn’t say which. A person told to be alert doesn’t get to pick whether he’s the one being looked for.
Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, and cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you, and then the lion. The care and the danger both come, and neither is softened. Resist him, standing firm in the faith, he writes, and the company he offers is that the family of believers throughout the world is undergoing the same kind of sufferings.
She signs his card while he’s out at the dock with the last of the trays. Then she tells him his brother called her back in May and asked her to find him something for the summer, and that she’d have taken him on anyway, and that the rec center wants somebody three afternoons a week once school starts, and his name is already on the request. He asks whether he’d still have the sink.
A Prayer to Remember
God, I want the plain sort of attention that notices the first thing slightly off, and I’ve never had much of it. I’ve been slow about this, and slower to admit that staying slow is a thing I choose. When it turns out I’ve been the one looked for all along, send me toward you.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
