Returning home for Thanksgiving

                                                        

On a recent visit to India, I met a father of two sons. One son has been dutiful and loyal through the years. The other? Well, let’s just say the police were familiar with his activities.

The wild child was a big, hard-punching brawler. He picked fights all over town. When he grew up, he got involved in criminal gangs, bringing shame on the family name.

“Do something about your son, or we will!” angry neighbors demanded.

“Please, give him a little more time,” pleaded the heartbroken father, a Christian leader in the community. “I am praying for him.”

The father wept many tears and prayed many prayers, refusing to give up on his wayward son. One day, the son came home, seeking forgiveness. Today, he joyfully works alongside his father and brother to spread the Gospel in Hindu villages. When asked about his son’s formerly evil ways, the father waves his hand, as if sweeping the painful memories away. Those days are past, he says. My son has come home.

 “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in,” wrote the poet Robert Frost.

 But here’s the thing: They don’t have to take you in. They probably will, if they love you. But they don’t have to.

 Nor does the Lord have to take you back when you come stumbling home — hungry, ashamed, afraid even to ask for restoration as His child — after abandoning Him yet again. But He will, if you ask with a repentant heart, because of who He is.

 What makes the story of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32) one of the Bible’s most moving descriptions of God’s grace is the way the rejected father responded before his returning son even opened his mouth: “But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion for him, and ran and embraced him and kissed him” (Luke 15:20b, NASB).

 I heard a preacher put it this way: God’s mercy is not giving us the punishment we deserve. God’s grace is giving us the love we don’t deserve.

 That’s what I’ll be thinking about during Thanksgiving this year.

 Another Scripture passage I’ve rediscovered is Isaiah 30:15 (KJV): “For thus saith the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel; In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength: and ye would not.”

 “And ye would not.” How sad is that?

 Instead of returning to the Lord and quietly trusting Him to defeat an invading enemy (mighty Assyria), Jerusalem panicked. God’s people sought help from Egypt, Israel’s old slave master, without even consulting the Lord. It was a political, military — and above all spiritual — mistake doomed to failure. But His offer of salvation stood, and as Isaiah later prophesied, it would be extended to all nations with the coming of the Messiah.

 It stands today, as an invitation both to wandering souls and to wandering nations (peoples). America seems very far from God at the moment. Other nations and peoples are even farther from Him — so far that they don’t even know He is Lord of all. But He is standing at the doorway of His kingdom, scanning the distance for any sign of His children coming home.

 “Come, let us return to the Lord. For He has torn us, but He will heal us; He has wounded us, but He will bandage us,” appealed Hosea, Isaiah’s contemporary and the prophet of a God heartbroken over the unfaithfulness of His people. “He will revive us after two days; He will raise us up on the third day, that we may live before Him. So let us know, let us press on to know the Lord. His going forth is as certain as the dawn; and He will come to us like the rain, like the spring rain watering the earth” (Hosea 6:1-3, NASB).

 Saint Augustine knew all about wandering from God. He was an enthusiastic sinner in a pagan age. But he yearned to return to his true and eternal home.

 “Life with You is the good life indeed,” Augustine prayed in his Confessions. “When we live apart from You, our life is a twisted life. Let us come home to You, Lord, lest we be lost. Life with You is a life in which nothing is lacking, because You are life. We do not fear that there is no home to turn to. We may have turned away from it. But it remains. It did not fall because we fell away. Our home is Your eternal life.”

 Make that your prayer this Thanksgiving. Come home to the One who is waiting for you.

The ‘Crews missile’ and Christmas

(Listen to an audio version at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/165/16575/16575-91862.mp3)

Have you heard about the “Crews missile”?

It was launched by Nick Crews, 67, a retired British Royal Navy submarine commander. But it wasn’t a torpedo aimed at the empire’s enemies; it was an email aimed at his three adult children. It blew up family relations — and created a furor in England and beyond after his eldest daughter, 40-year-old Emily, released the message to the media.

Fed up with his children’s career failures, divorces and other assorted dysfunctions, angry at the toll their constant crises had taken on his wife and anxious about the future for his grandchildren, Crews let ’em have it. Here’s an excerpt from his “Dear all three” email:

“Mum and I have been used to taking our own misfortunes on the chin, and making our own effort to bash our little paths through life without being a burden to others. Having done our best — probably misguidedly — to provide for our children, we naturally hoped to see them in turn take up their own banners and provide happy and stable homes for their own children. … [Y]et each of you has contrived to avoid even moderate achievement. Far from your children being able to rely on your provision, they are faced with needing to survive their introduction to life with you as parents. … none of [whom has] the maturity and sound judgment to make [wise] decisions.”

He closed with this:

“I can now tell you that I for one … have had enough of being forced to live through the never-ending bad dream of our children’s underachievement and domestic ineptitudes. I want to hear no more from any of you until, if you feel inclined, you have a success or an achievement or a realistic plan for the support and happiness of your children to tell me about. I don’t want to see your mother burdened anymore with your miserable woes. … I am bitterly, bitterly disappointed. Dad.”

Tough love? Crews has become both a hero and a villain in England since his blunt message became public, setting off a media storm and provoking thousands of responses. Many Britons admire his hard-hitting candor in an age of endless excuse making for personal irresponsibility. Others condemn him as unfeeling and cruel.

“My parents just don’t do tea and sympathy and never have,” reported daughter Emily, who said she was devastated by her father’s words but admitted they contain a lot of truth. Her two younger siblings insist on an apology; 35-year-old brother Fred refuses to speak to Dad until he gets one.

In a subsequent interview with the London Daily Mail, Crews said he “hated having to send [the email] and I have examined my conscience. … I still mean every word.”

Navy commanders aren’t known for giving gentle feedback. My maternal grandfather was a ship captain, and I’ve heard lots of stories about the rough justice he delivered when his kids went astray. Sometimes it worked; sometimes it backfired. As an occasionally exasperated father, I can sympathize with Crews. As a son who inspired similar fury and despair in the hearts of my own parents more than once, I also sympathize with his children.

But angry tirades about the failings of others don’t work, contends New York Times writer David Brooks in a column about Crews. “People don’t behave badly because they lack information about their shortcomings. They behave badly because they’ve fallen into patterns of destructive behavior from which they’re unable to escape,” Brooks writes. True enough, but he proceeds to serve up warmed-over recommendations about rewarding good behaviors and ignoring bad ones. That doesn’t work in the long run, either, if the darkness inside our hearts doesn’t change.

Why do I bring up this painful family episode so close to Christmas? When I first read about Nick Crews and his anguish over his children, I thought about God, our Father. In many Bible passages, the Lord speaks of His despair and wrath caused by the sins of His people. The Old Testament prophets record a long litany of His bitter disappointments (as Crews might describe them) in His wayward children.

“I have spread out My hands all day long to a rebellious people,” the Lord cried, “who walk in the way which is not good, following their own thoughts, a people who continually provoke Me to My face …” (Isaiah 65:2-3, NASB). But God also promised a sign in that same great book of prophecy: “Behold, a virgin will be with child and bear a son, and she will call His name Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14b, NASB).

Some 600 years before the birth of Christ, a Father whose heart had already been broken countless times was planning an act of love that would go far beyond the imagination of any earthly mind. What if He had washed His hands of us altogether? What if He had told us never to seek Him again until we could redeem our own hopelessly evil selves?

Instead, He came to live among us as a servant and went to the cross to make a way for us to return to Him.

Yes, there will be consequences — eternal ones — for every soul that rejects the amazing grace of God offered through His Son. But for now, the offer stands.

Here’s the message of Christmas: A loving Father is still waiting for us to come home.