This passage from the book of Jeremiah is a letter from the prophet to the Hebrew people who are in exile in Babylon. They have to be in shock—they’ve been captured by a foreign army who, after burning their homes and temple, carried them off to another land—they would have to be in a severe state of depression. In other places in the scriptures, we hear of their wailing and grief.

However, Jeremiah tells them to carry on with their lives and live as though things were normal. God promised to restore Jerusalem, but while they wait, the Israelites were to be productive citizens of the land where they were. I have often heard the phrase “bloom where you are planted”—I think that is what God is saying here.

We should hear these words: “Build houses, live in them, plant gardens, and eat what they produce. Take wives, and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare, you will find your welfare.” (Jer. 29:5–7 NRSV).

Often, we are told to wait on something. Many times, we are told to wait by God. Instead of sitting around nervously expecting something to happen, we need to get busy doing the work that God has set before us and not focus on the things we are expecting. This is what I call active waiting.

A Thankful Heart (Luke 17:11–19)

In this week’s lesson from the Gospel of Luke, we hear the story of the healing of the ten lepers. In this story, Christ heals ten people who have leprosy. One of the ten is a foreigner, a Samaritan. When we hear the word Samaritan, we think of the story “the Good Samaritan.” If we were to play a word association game with people today, most people when you say “Samaritan” would reply with “good.” However, in the time of Christ, the Samaritans were considered anything but good—by today’s standards, it would be like talking about a member of Al Qaeda—but it was the Samaritan that came back and thanked Christ for His miracle of healing

That made it even harder for the religious leaders around Jesus to hear this story. We would not want to hear a story about our enemy doing the very thing that we were supposed to do and likewise failed to do. How many times are we more like the nine lepers that were healed and never returned to give thanks? God gives us so much, and yet we are quicker to complain when things do not go our way than we are to thank God for the many blessings. We need to learn to have a thankful heart.