Karen:     Does God seem distant to you? Uninterested in your life? Has your walk with the Lord lost its sense of wonder and delight?

David:     If so, just give us a chance to help turn things around for you, okay? Please?

Intro:      Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife, noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.

David:     In a sentence, here’s where we’re headed this visit. Keeping a notebook of your God Hunt sightings is a good way to begin sensing the presence of the Lord in your life.

Karen:     So, I have in front of me the God Hunt book. We wrote this, we can’t figure out how many years ago, but let’s say it’s 15 to 20 years ago. And it’s just been such an extraordinary help to people through the years, not just to them but to us. And we began the God Hunt because we wanted to teach our children how to find God in the everyday of their worlds. We have four kids. And one of the lessons I learned was that what’s learned with pleasure is learned full measure. There’s a whole theory of education built around play. And sometimes when we’re setting our minds to being spiritual or to growing spiritually, we forget that God delights. And so, we put the God Hunt in the framework of hide and seek, and that joyful game we used to play when we were children.

In fact, I’ve asked that question all around the world. Who of you has never played the game hide and seek? I’ve never had a hand raised. So, that was the framework.

David:      It was kind of a universal game.

Karen:      Universal game. That was the framework by which we began to approach and teach the God Hunt.

David:     We eventually put into four categories the sightings that people were looking for in regard to their everyday lives. And let’s go through those one at a time. We began last time we met together for a podcast saying what those categories were. If you weren’t with us, then write these down as we go through them.

The first one is an obvious answer to prayer. Now, what are we looking for? I can say from my very recent history that I’ve had a marvelous partial answer to prayer.

Karen:      Partial answer to prayer. Obvious answer to prayer.

David:      Well, the category is an obvious answer to prayer. And to me, it’s obvious how God is answering this prayer. I have been really in pain. I don’t know whether to describe it as an ache that goes on all the time and then all of a sudden, it’ll be a sharp pain. But my back is out of place. And it was such that it went down into each of the legs. And it was very difficult for me to walk. I couldn’t put socks on.

Karen:     There’s just a lot you couldn’t do. I mean, I was running myself ragged and happily, so dutiful wife that I am.

David:     You’ve been good. I keep thinking she’s going to run on a page pretty quickly.

Karen:     Well, I felt so worried because you were in obvious pain. So, something happened whereby you put, I think it was carrying boxes of books upstairs, frankly.

David:     You had books out of the warehouse needed and a lot of them, I’m talking 10, 15 boxes that are quite heavy. And I had to bring them to the house, take them down to the basement, repack them so we could send them out to different people, then bring them up again, put them in the car, take them over to the other cart.

Karen:     It was just too much. I’m pretty sure that’s what it was.

David:      I shouldn’t think of it at the time.

Karen:      But it was no sharp pain. It was, you know, like when you hurt yourself, you know, you, oh, what have I done? But it was just you’d stretch that muscle out.

David:     Then I couldn’t get out of bed. I said, “Lord, it’s very difficult to do your work in the world.” I could hardly move. And I’m conscious of this all of the time. And so, I began my prayers.

You are sometimes the individual who answers my prayer on behalf of the Lord. And you said, “Let’s go see a chiropractor.” And you called and we were able to get in immediately. Which was fascinating. I’ve not been to chiropractors that much in my life. And this man happened to be a believer, which we found out very quickly. He was verbal about his faith.

Karen:     Very verbal about his faith. We had a lovely sharing time about our spiritual journeys as he was working on your back.

David:     And so, he said, “Okay, you’re out of alignment” and all that talk that you’re used to. Then he said, “You need to come back in two days,” which I did. And I’m not cured, but I am able to function. And that’s a huge thing. And in the process of this, as a special gift to me, you had purchased a ping pong table.

Karen:     Yes.

David:      And that got built. And I started playing ping pong, which probably was a mistake.

Karen:     Playing the ping pong, I don’t believe it was the mistake. It was picking up the balls. That was the mistake.

David:     Well, when you play ping pong, you have to do that quite often.

Karen:     So anyway.

David:     I could say that’s an obvious answer to prayer. And a person could respond, yeah, yeah, but the chiropractor really should get the credit.

I’m happy to give credit where credit is due. And I’m happy to say that I prayed about it enough times. And in the process, I’m sure God was in the healing as well. And I’m not totally there yet.

Karen:     But think about the lovely conversations we had with this Christian man. We had no idea he was Christian. He was very verbal about his faith. So, as he’s working on your body, we’re doing this spiritual connection and sharing. I mean, it was just lovely. I can’t wait to go. I’ll go back with you in your next appointment. I think it’s tomorrow. So that’s an obvious answer to prayer. Obviously.

David:     That is one category. If you’re looking for how God is active in your life, look for how he answers prayer. If you’re not a praying person, which is many times people get into the habit of not praying, then begin those prayers and see what God is going to do in terms of your life. So, obvious answer to prayer is one category. Let’s go to a second category.

Karen:     Well, the second category is any unexpected evidence of his care. We thank God for the obvious things: a roof over our head, for safety in our lives, for enough money to put food on the table and pay our bills. Those are things that we know he’s provided for us. And if we’re grateful people, we will thank him for. But there’s this category of unexpected evidence of his care.

David:     We have been in this house for about 45 years. We have not made very many improvements or even updates in terms of the house.

Karen:      Some decorative things.

David:      You’re good at that. We basically said we’re going to have to invest some money because…

Karen:     …there were major things.

David:     They’re major things. Yeah, we’ve had the same rug in the living room, dining room, front of how long we had?

Karen:      40 years.

David:      Okay, let’s not be too, too specific or you embarrass me. Okay, we had a gentleman who was trying to fix a problem behind the wall, and he dug with his saw little holes in the plaster.

Karen:     And the plaster we’re going to see. Yeah, plaster part in the scene.

David:     Dry walling. Dry walling. That’s a messy, messy job. I know these have to happen and we were figuring out how much do we have to put aside to save and it’s going to take us a good while to bring the house up to date. And then I went out to the mailbox one day, came back and I had bills, and I was looking through

Karen:     the bill and a letter from some friends.

David:     Yeah, I saw in the return address. Oh yeah, good. And I kind of put it aside so that I could see what other mail was there because I wanted to actually sit down and read a letter from these people. We knew them for a long time, and I opened it and there was a check-in site and I thought, “Oh my, I couldn’t believe it.”

I called upstairs. You were upstairs and you said, “Are you alright?” And I said, “Just read this.” And then you said, “Well, did they send something?” I said, “Here.”

And you looked at the check and you did the very same thing. It was like you were absolutely speechless because we were able to do all of the repairs. And it took a good while. But at the end of that time, we still had money left.

And it was like we were in a different house. We had all new floors in the living room, dining room. We had carpeting in some of the areas. It was such an overwhelming sense of feeling loved, not only by these people but by the Lord as well.

Karen:     Those friends who gave us that money, she had sold some property. And so, wanted to share that with different ministries and different people in need. And she said, “The Lord just kept laying you on my heart.” And I said, “Okay, okay. We’re going to give some of this money to the Mains.”

David:     And she made it very clear. She said, “This is not for your ministry, this is for you.”

Karen:     Yes.

David:     Which was absolutely, I just thought I’m even tearing up thinking about it now.

Karen:     Well, even more than that, the way it was given through, I’m not even sure, some sort of foundation or something like that. We didn’t even have to pay taxes on it.

Okay, God gives you gift but he goes way beyond and above your expectations. It was one of those times we really were deeply, deeply moved.

David:     Unexpected evidence of God’s care. That’s a big category. Your story may not be like our story, but it has that same sense of, “Oh my goodness, the Lord just did something wonderful.”

Okay, let’s review because these are things that have to get embedded in people’s heads. They’re pretty obvious to us because we’ve been doing it for so long but it’s new to a lot of people. An obvious answer to prayer. Unexpected evidence of his care. What’s the next one?

Karen:     Unusual linkage or timing. Now, it’s a little hard to explain this one. But it’s those times in our lives when we kind of hit our forehead with the palm of our hand and say, “Huh, what a coincidence.”

Well, we walked with the Lord long enough. I’ve come to the conclusion that, for those who are walking with him, there are no such things as coincidences. They are not coincidences. There’s angelic manifestations that go on that we can’t see. There’s the divine leading closer to us in contriving circumstances in a way but they are not coincidences. When you take these apart and look at them, you are amazed at the way God works in the world.

David:     Okay, this is unusual linkage or timing. And I’m emphasizing the timing, okay? Because no sooner had we gotten the house reworked. So, we were so happy people would come in and say, “Wow, it looks new and nice in here.” We were going to go to a silent film with Joel, our son.

Karen:     It’s sort of a film festival, silent film festival.

David:     Yeah, he enjoys those.

Karen:     Well, his major was film.

David:     Yeah.

Karen:     So, silent films is very much a part of the beginning of the film industry.

David:     And in the Chicagoland area, they have major theaters where somebody’s playing the organ. We were all set to go. We were going to go out to dinner afterward. And it was about five minutes before we thought if we leave at this time, we’ll get there in plenty of time. And we had tickets ahead of time. And I ran upstairs to get something I don’t remember what it was. And bang, pipers.

Karen:     In your bathroom in your study.

David:     I didn’t know what it was. It’s just huge. And then, looking there was just water pouring all over the bathroom. And I called Joel. And Joel came up. And fortunately, he’s pretty familiar with these areas. And we worked, I suppose, not much help whatsoever, because the thing was so old, he couldn’t get the valve turned on. It was stuck.

Karen:     We had to turn the main water off in the house eventually. But I was downstairs, and it started to leak into the living room. So, the new plaster work that we’d had done.

David:     Nothing but just, “Oh, Lord, why would you do this? This is absolutely incredible.” I’m so thrilled that I’ve given you credit for this happen. And now we got this softy mess again.

Karen:     So, Joel went downstairs and found the main water, main and turned it off, which of course is wise to do. And we had the mess cleaned up. It was basically water and one hole in the dining room’s ceiling.

David:     Another hole after that beautiful work had been done in the dry parking lots.

Karen:     It would be easy to repair. It wasn’t a big major job. But the point of this is, as far as what we’re talking about, is…

David:     Well, the more we talked about it, all of a sudden, we said, “What if we had left for the film?”

Karen:     And that pipe had broken, and that water had been running for two to three hours. We would have come home to a complete disaster.

David:     I don’t even know if we could have saved the house.

Karen:     Probably, but you know, it would have been a mess for sure.

David:     It would have been a huge mess.

Karen:     So, that’s an example of God’s work in our lives through unusual linkage or timing.

David:     Yeah. And the timing was just another two or three minutes, we’d have been gone.

Karen:     We’d have been out of the house.

David:     And it would have been a tragic thing. And I just said, “Oh Lord, I didn’t even see the problems. We would have had, had we gone.

You know, so I’m just, I’m so grateful. It’s instead of a massive destructive thing. It’s a big mess, but we’ll get it cleaned up.

Karen:     Yeah, it was cleaned up in an hour, you know.

David:     We’ll call those drywalling guys again. They’re pretty used to the road.

Karen:     We really like you guys. We got another hole in our ceiling.

David:     But those are illustrations. What I’m doing is just going through categories and saying when you’re looking for God’s work in your world here are different ones. So, we’ve talked about obvious answer to prayer. We’ve talked about unexpected evidence of his care, unusual linkage or timing. There’s one I’ve missed. What is it?

Karen:     It’s help to do his work in the world. Help to do his work in the world. Of course, we see this all the time because we’re in ministry. And so, our lives are dedicated to doing God’s work in the world. But it’s a little harder maybe for people who are not in ministry to say, well, how?

David:     Ministry is a big category. You’ll be a schoolteacher and be in ministry. You can be a doctor and be in ministry.

Karen:     They often don’t think that way.

David:     Possible.

Karen:     So, we have an illustration that is more out of average ordinary everyday life. I’m a gardener and I am passionate about gardening.

David:     An understatement of the year.

Karen:     For me gardening is really an act of worship because I get into it, and I think passionate gardeners feel this way. They think, “Oh, this world that God has created, how did he do that? How has he done it? How has he put it all together?” “From this little seed,” one of a grandson sent to me, Can you imagine, Nina, from this little seed, these big things grow?” Well, that’s the wonder of being a gardener. So, we moved into this house 40, what was it?

David:     About 45 years ago.

Karen:     It’s three quarters of an acre. And to this embryonic gardener, I mean, was starting and eager to get going. I started to dig and lo and behold in the middle of fabulous Illinois loam. I mean, we’re known for our black soil in Illinois. Our house was planted on a strip of clay. I mean, it was clay. You dig it up. There was hardly any topsoil. I can remember many times working with it and just sitting down, putting my head and my knees, and just crying. I felt like such a big job. I kept at it for 40 years. This spring was sort of the culmination of all of that work. You look out the backyard, it is just glorious.

David:     That’s breathtaking.

Karen:     Breathtaking. And that’s because you keep moving things till, they get in the right sunshine. You keep moving things when they get too big, and you have to divide them. And you run to the nursery to pick stuff up. It’s just a constant thing in the summer.

I am including this under the category of help to do God’s work in the world. God loves it when his world is beautiful: when we repair the broken things, when we put something together that has aesthetic beauty, or when we build something that shelters those who are without any of those things. I mean, this category could go on and on and on.

So, I’m making a very plebeian distinction and parallel to the fact that those of us who love to garden. When the garden comes to fruition, when we pull the vegetables out and we can eat them, when the bushes are grown big enough and they flower and flourish and you look at it and you’re filled with wonder. That’s help, to do God’s work in the world. So, I’m including this experience of mine in that category.

David:     Okay. And now we don’t need to define it, but maybe we do, I guess, is notebook. Because the sentence was keeping a notebook of your God hunt sightings is a good way to begin sensing the presence of the Lord in your life. Most people don’t have a God hunt notebook. How important is that?

Karen:     It’s extraordinarily important and every single person of spiritual depth that I know, even those who are dead in the centuries have gone before us. They have kept a record of God’s work in some way in their life. I mean, some of the reasons we know about these spiritual giants is through their spiritual notebooks.

So, you sort of liken it to watching the masters, the golfers who have a notebook, a narrow one with a pouring top and they slip it into the back pocket. We watch it.

David:     They’re just keeping score. They have to do that.

Karen:     They’re making notes about the greens. Yeah. But this is very much like that. So, we would say strongly that if you don’t have a notebook, that is a record of your prayers and your God hunt sightings, you need to begin one as soon as you’re able to do. And then you go over those things. So, I have 40 years of notebooks and I begin to think, “Oh, can’t pass those on to our kids when we go. This is too much work for them.”

So, I thought, “I’ll read them and then I’ll toss them.”

David, they are so filled with evidence of God that I’m not sure I can do that. I’m not sure I can do that. So, I may have to just leave this for the kids to decide. I’m sorry kids. If it’s valuable to them because when I read them, I just think, “Oh, I remember that. Oh, yes, he was with us.” Yeah.

David:     I would like for you to read just a little bit. I asked you to pick a section you thought you would like to read from the God Hunt.

Karen:     Okay.

David:     And I would also like to say to people, if they would prefer to have a copy, they could read themselves. We have enough boxes of these books that I think we could fill any request that people have. If you want to send a gift, fine. If you don’t want to, that’s fine too. If you just make it out to Mainstay Ministries, that would be fine. We can send you a tax-deductible receipt.

Karen:     Let us know. And if you want multiple copies to give to your kids or whatever. We’re happy to do that as well. We believe that these books need to be out there ministering.

David:     Okay. This is an Intervarsity Christian Fellowship book. And I’m guessing 25 years ago when it first came out, it was still in print. Okay. And I’m going to get you to just define by reading a paragraph from it.

Karen:     Okay. Well, let me read this section up in the front. This is sort of a summary.

What is the God Hunt? Simply defined, the God Hunt is choosing to recognize God any time he intervenes in our everyday life. This is a tool my husband and I developed decades ago to teach our four children how to experience the presence of God in their everyday activities.

Kids actually do this better than big people once they get going on it. We firmly believe that it is a sin to make the Christian life boring or theoretical. It is neither. In developing spiritual disciplines or in teaching Holy Truth, we attempt to apply this teaching model. What is learned with pleasure is learned full measure. The God Hunt, because of its playful quality, has been used by hundreds of thousands of people literally of seekers worldwide, people who have desired to identify God in their everyday lives, but have had difficulty in doing so. Good teachers encourage play. And that’s why we introduce the element of kind of going on a divine hunt. The German poet philosopher Friedrich Schiller wisely suggested that human beings are completely human only at play. Isn’t that lovely?

David:     Yeah, it’s very, very nice.

Outro:     You’ve been listening to the Before We Go Podcast. And if you would like to write to us, please send us an email at the following address, hosts@beforewego.show. That’s all-lower-case letters, hosts@beforewego.show

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