When I was a child, my mother used to take me and my brothers shopping and every time we walked into a store, she stopped us, looked into our eyes to make sure she had our attention and gave us the same speech, “If you get lost, don’t wander around the store looking for me. Stop. Stay right where you are and I will come find you.” I did get lost a few times. I turned around and all of sudden she wasn’t there and I’d look around a little bit thinking she was just around the next corner and when I saw she wasn’t I would stop and wait for her. Admittedly I was anxious when I didn’t know where she was but under the anxiety and fear was the certain knowledge that she was looking for me and would find me if I just stayed where I was. And, of course, she always did. Even though it seemed like forever, I was never lost for more than a few minutes before she would find me, give me a hug, tell me to stay close and we were off again about our shopping trip.
This story has some very obvious connections to the Good
Shepherd story found in Luke 15 but more importantly, it’s the memory God gave
me that brought me to him. I’d given up on God as a child, floating between atheism
and agnosticism. I’d been living with untreated depression for decades and surviving
in an abusive relationship. I was trapped and suffocating in my life. I tried
everything I could think of in my power to relieve some of pressure and pain
and had given up, defeated and consigned to my fate. I remember desperately
wanting God to be real because the only way I was going to find peace or joy in
my life was if he was real and if he even cared.
One very late night/early morning I was sitting quietly
writing in a journal when this 20-year-old obscure memory from a childhood I
had blocked out came to me so vividly I could hear my mother’s voice say the words
and I realized that for years I had been metaphorically wandering around
looking for God instead of waiting for him to find me. That was the moment I
surrendered to this God I didn’t know yet. I remember the prayer: “God, I’ve
tried everything I can to fix my life and there’s nothing left for me to try. You
are my only hope so I’m going to sit right here and wait for you to find me.” I
didn’t realize then the floodgate of power and grace God released into my life
and it would be years before he revealed his grace in Jesus Christ to me.
For several years before the pandemic, I’d been living in a stagnant period of my faith journey, feeling like my faith and my relationship with God had dried up—like a couple sitting at the breakfast table with nothing to say to each other anymore and barely acknowledging each other’s existence. Occasionally, I tried to liven things up, to reignite the fire of the relationship, to grab hold of the intimacy I shared with God in the early years of my faith. But I quickly drifted back to my almost non-existent relationship status with God. Then 2020 came and my life has been about surviving one crisis after another: the virus, a depressive episode, my father’s sudden death and assuming the care of mother, suffering with constant vertigo for 5 months and the subsequent 3 months of therapy to correct it, the sudden loss of the job and ministry I had enjoyed for almost 20 years and had planned to retire from and most recently the rapid decline of my mother's health and having to put her into hospice care.
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