Seek the peace of the city

Imagine the exiles in Babylon, living out of their luggage. They will not hang anything on the walls, will not plant a thing they could not abandon at a moment's notice, because surely this captivity is temporary and any day now the word will come that they are going home. They are sitting on their suitcases, suspended, refusing to live. Then a letter arrives from the prophet Jeremiah, and its instruction lands like a small earthquake: build houses and live in them. Plant gardens and eat what they grow. Marry, have children, let your children marry. And the hardest line of all — seek the peace of the city that conquered you, and pray for it, because in its welfare you will find your own. Settle in. Live forward. This is no endorsement of the cruelty that dragged them there; God did not author their captors' violence. Yet His sovereign, redemptive purpose was somehow at work even through that hard history, and into it He speaks the famous promise: I know the plans I have for you, plans of peace and a future, even here, even now, even in Babylon.

You may be living somewhere you never chose — a season, a diagnosis, a new normal — and treating it the way the exiles treated Babylon, as a temporary inconvenience you refuse to unpack for. You keep your life packed in boxes, suspended, waiting for the old normal to resume so the real living can start again. Jeremiah's letter is addressed to you too: build, plant, settle, and seek the genuine good of even this place. God is not asking you to pretend it is home, or to be grateful for whatever hardship landed you here; He never calls the wound good. He is asking you to stop waiting in limbo and live forward where you actually are. And underneath the instruction runs the promise — that His thoughts toward you, even in this unwanted place, are thoughts of peace and a future. For Israel the exile was not random misfortune; it was God's own discipline — a severe mercy on a people who had refused every gentler call, and He says so plainly: I have caused you to be carried away. Your hardship may be nothing of the kind, for not every wound is a judgment. But nothing reaches you outside His hand, and whatever He sends or allows, He is able to bend toward a future. So unpack the suitcase. Plant something. Live.