Try this one evening. Take a sheet of paper and write down every address you have ever lived at. The yard where you were born. The tenement room after your parents separated. Your aunt’s house in town when you went to high school. The basement flat in Brampton or Brixton. The first place with your name on the lease. The house you finally built.
Then, beside each one, write down who you met there. A neighbour who prayed over you when you were sick. A landlady who invited you to church. A man at the standpipe who talked about Jesus while your bucket filled. A classmate whose mother fed you when there was nothing at home.
For many believers, that list reads less like a record of moves and more like a trail. We were not always looking for God. But looking back, it seems clear that He was looking for us, and that He used addresses to do it.
A woman, a lamp and a broom
Jesus told three stories back to back about lost things: a sheep, a coin and a son. The middle one is set entirely indoors. A woman has ten silver coins and loses one. She does not shrug and make do with nine. Jesus asks, “What woman, having ten silver coins, if she loses one coin, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it?” (Luke 15:8, NKJV).
Anyone who has lost something small in a house knows what that search looks like. You move the settee. You get down on your knees with a torch and look under the bed. You shake out the mat. You sweep the corners you usually ignore. It is patient, thorough, slightly desperate work, and it does not stop until the thing is found.
That, Jesus says, is how God searches for people. Not with a casual glance, but room by room, corner by corner, with the lamp held low.
The boundaries of their dwellings
When Paul stood before the thinkers of Athens, he made a remarkable claim about where people live. God, he said, “has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:26-27, NKJV).
The boundaries of their dwellings. The phrase is broad: it speaks of nations and peoples. But it reaches down to our own lives too. The move you did not want, because the rent went up or the job ended or the marriage broke. The years in a district you never liked. The house abroad where you felt like a stranger. None of these were outside God’s sight, and none were wasted in His search for you.
This does not mean every hard move was good in itself. Evictions, disasters and family breakdowns are real losses, and Scripture never asks us to pretend otherwise. It means that even in those places, God did not stop looking. He is “not far from each one of us,” whatever the address.
Your house as part of someone else’s search
There is another side to this. If God used other people’s homes to find you, He may want to use yours to find someone else.
The young man renting the room at the back. The family who just moved in across the road and do not yet know anyone. The helper who comes on Thursdays. The grandchild who spends summers with you. Your house is one of the addresses in their story. The welcome they receive at your gate, the way your household speaks and argues and forgives, may be one of the ways God is sweeping the corners of their lives.
That is not a call to turn every visit into a sermon. Often the lamp is simply kindness: a plate of food, a lift to the clinic, a listening ear on the verandah. People remember the houses where they were treated well.
Joy in the house when the coin is found
The story of the lost coin ends with a party. The woman calls her friends and neighbours together: “Rejoice with me, for I have found the piece which I lost!” Jesus says there is the same kind of joy in heaven over one person who turns back to God.
So if you have been found, look back at that list of addresses with gratitude. And if you feel you are still lost, perhaps in a house that feels far from God, take heart. The lamp is lit. The broom is moving. He has not given up searching.
For reflection
- Looking at the places you have lived, where can you now see God searching for you?
- Whose story might your home be part of right now?
Father, thank You for searching for me through every house and every season, even the ones I would rather forget. Where I am still hiding, find me. And make my home a place where others meet Your kindness. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
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