A Short Story
“But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you”, he heard the preacher say.
He was listening very attentively to the preacher speak, deeply impressed by his sincerity, commitment and passion, but when he heard these words, his attention suddenly shifted from the preacher to himself.
He didn’t know what ‘seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness’ exactly meant, but instinctively he knew that it was definitely something he had never done in all his life. The verse spoke about seeking the kingdom of God and His righteousness first, but he had never done anything like that—not second, nor third, nor fourth, not even last! He had done a great many things in his life, but to ‘seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness’, whatever it might mean, was certainly not among them.
That realization came to him as a great shock!
He lifted himself up from his seat, went outside and parked himself on a bench under a tree nearby as troubling thoughts swirled about in his mind. He said to himself, “I’m in my mid-50s and quite possibly in the evening of my life now, with perhaps just a few years left before I am called back to God. How I’ve wasted my one and only life doing all sorts of things but not once seeking the kingdom of God and His righteousness! What a fool I have been!”
In his mind, he did a quick rough calculation of how he had spent his years, noticing, as he did so, that seeking the kingdom of God and His righteousness had been conspicuously absent throughout. Till the age of 18, he had been at school. He had spent more than a dozen precious years in this phase of his life studying various things, but most of these—from chemistry and physics to accountancy, calculus and geometry—had proved to be of absolutely no practical use to him ever. If only they—his teachers and his parents—had cared to tell him about the importance of seeking the kingdom of God and His righteousness (which was the thing of ultimate importance, and surely more useful for him than things like algebra and tales of kings and queens that he had been forced to learn, year after year)! It wouldn’t have taken them much time to do that—possibly just a few minutes. But not once had anyone—at school and at home—ever made even the most oblique reference to this concept.
The same was true for the next seventeen years that he had spent in college and at university, going on to do a Ph.D. and then, after that, engaging in post-doctoral research. Seeking the kingdom of God and His righteousness was among the things farthest from his mind in this period. In fact, he had been ‘educated’ out of all devotion to God in this phase of his life, and he couldn’t remember even once having a conversation about God with anyone he met in all these years.
Then, from his mid-30s till the present, he had taken up various jobs and had travelled around the world. His work and his passions had kept him very busy, but being busy seeking the kingdom of God and His righteousness was definitely not among the things that had engaged his attention then. Besides chasing money, he had wasted these valuable decades in debauchery and indulgence, in pursuing theories and lifestyles that he had later discovered to be wrong and advocating causes that he had now recoiled from. True, he had done acts of kindness every now and then (helping people with money and occasionally visiting NGOs, for example), but that really wasn’t the same as seeking the kingdom of God and His righteousness.
“Almost my whole life so far has been spent doing anything but seeking the kingdom of God and His righteousness,” he said to himself. “What an awful waste of energy, resources and time! Oh, how I bungled things up!”
He thought of how he could have put all those misspent years of his to much better use had he devoted himself to seeking the kingdom of God and His righteousness instead of seeking to follow the ‘kingdom’ his own desires and his own notions of ‘righteousness’. How he wished someone like the preacher he had just heard had come into his life when he was much younger and told him about the need to ‘seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness’! That way, he might have saved himself from wasting the bulk of his life.
He buried his head in his palms and began to sob. He really felt miserable. But a while later, he heard a voice inside him telling him, “Your past is past and cannot be changed. You have no control over your past, but you can control your present. You can begin to seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness right now if you want to.”