Seek the peace of the city
Jeremiah's letter to the exiles
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.
“Seek the peace of the city where I have caused you to be carried away captive, and pray to the LORD for it.”
— The LORD, through Jeremiah, to the exiles — Jeremiah 29:7 (WEB)
“I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you hope in your latter end.”
Reorientation stops waiting in limbo and lives forward. Watch the exiles sitting on their luggage, and Jeremiah's letter telling them to build, plant, and seek the welfare of the very city they are in. This phase accepts that you may be living in a season, even a place, you would never have chosen — and chooses to be fruitful in it anyway, rather than holding your breath for the old life to resume.
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.
The whole Church can spend a long season braced for a return to how things were, refusing to invest in the actual present, sitting on its luggage and waiting for Christendom to come back. Jeremiah tells the exiles to seek the peace of the city they are in, to bless and build the real place, not the remembered one. The upheaval shaking Western and global Christianity is no random misfortune the Body merely endures; it is the LORD's reordering, severe in its mercy, never the author of evil yet sovereign over it and able to redeem it. Across history the Church has been most alive where it sought the welfare of its actual moment. Before a watching world, the Body's good is bound up with the good it gives away.
Places change, exiles end, and the home you remember may never return in the shape you left it. What cannot be shaken is the God who goes with His people into Babylon and is no less present there — whose thoughts toward you are peace and a future even in the place you did not choose. He is not waiting back at the old normal. He is already here, in the unwanted now, working a redemption you cannot yet see.
- Where am I living out of my luggage, refusing to unpack in a season I keep insisting is temporary?
- What would it mean to seek the genuine good of this place I never chose, rather than waiting it out?
- Can I trust that God's thoughts toward me are peace and a future even here, even now?
Lord, I have been sitting on my suitcase in a place I never wanted, refusing to live until the old normal returns. You did not author the hardship that brought me here, yet You are here in it with me. Teach me to unpack — to build, to plant, to seek the good of this very place. Help me trust that Your thoughts toward me, even now, are peace and a future. Amen.