Good Monday Morning, Dearest Friends,
There was a woman in a church I served some years ago; her name was Marilyn, and she told me her story. She grew up the daughter of a pastor, so she was a P.K., a “preacher’s kid.” She said she was in worship every single Sunday. By the time she was twelve, she had memorized 2,000 Bible verses, and she had read the entire Bible four times through. When she graduated high school, she went to Bible College. By the time she was done with Bible College, she said, “I think I’ve had enough church for the rest of my life.” So, she decided she wasn’t going back to church.
Subsequent experiences she had, in relationships and with jobs, began to undo her faith, and she found herself struggling to even believe in God. That began a forty-year wandering away from God. She became a teacher; she read philosophy and other things to fill her life up, but she was no longer going to church, and for forty years, she wandered away.
One summer a few years ago, she was going to pick up her nephew from church camp; it was the same church camp she had attended when she was little. While driving through the North Carolina mountains, she was flipping through the channels to find something on the car radio, and when she got to one station, she heard these words blurted out on the radio: “Are you homesick for God? Are you homesick for God?”
It just swept over her. She began crying as she was driving down the road. She arrived at the camp and remembered the places she had been as a little girl. She began to pray and said, “I don’t even know if I believe in you. Lord, I’m homesick for you. Help me to believe.” She cried and prayed there at the camp, and she said, “I felt I believed for the first time in my life — not because my parents wanted me to, but because I really believed.” She said, “I was that sheep that had wandered away for forty years, and God still took me back.”
Marilyn volunteered at a nursing home, and they were having a chapel service one Sunday afternoon. One particular Sunday, the preacher who was scheduled didn’t show up. The residents all looked at Marilyn and asked, “Do you have a message for us, Marilyn?” She said, “Well, I guess I can tell you my story,” and she told them the story that I just told you.
When she got to the end, she looked around, and there were multiple people crying, sitting in that room. Some of them, I assume, were crying because they, too, had been lost. And they felt on that day that, through Marilyn, God was crying out, “Are you homesick for me?”
Are you homesick for God? Have you wandered away in your private thought life, in your actions, and in who you are? Have you forgotten the path that you once were on? If so, I believe God would say, “I want you back. I never stopped loving you. I want you.” One of the most poignant verses in the entire Bible is found in Luke 19:10, “For the Son of Man came to seek and save the lost.” Even as a pastor, there are times I feel lost, for this reason or that, with what I’m going through or what’s happening in my life; and I want to be found in him.
Don’t you?
Jesus stands at the door and knocks, for each of us,
Bruce Jones, Pastor
Imagine Church
