We've all experienced it - that chilling, heart-stopping moment when you turn around and your parents are not there. You’re a five, or six maybe, and you are at a crowded department store, an amusement park, a county fair. You a walking with your parents and something catches your eye, so you stop, just for a moment, to look. But your parents do not notice, and so keep on walking. When you turn around, they are gone. You are trapped in a forest of faceless adults. For that moment, the blood in you veins is a cold as ice water. For that moment, there in that crowd, you are utterly alone.
Most parents have experienced a moment even more chilling. You are walking with your children at a t department store, amusement park, or county fair, and when you turn around they are gone. Losing a child is far worse.
When we live our lives by faith – all of us do, or we wouldn’t walk out the door in the morning. We believe we will make it to work safely, and then return home safely in the evening. We believe that if we lock our doors at night and set the ADT we will wake up in the morning to start another day. We walk out the door believing that the odds we will be hit by a stray bullet, have a piece of spaced junk drop out of the sky onto us, or that a tiny clot in our leg will travel to our brain are small. But healthy people have sudden strokes, helicopters fall out of the sky, bridges fall into the Mississippi River, and terrorists fly planes into skyscrapers sometimes. Our faith that things will go on as before is only usually confirmed, not always. Sometimes, there are moments, when our vulnerability in this big universe is startling, and clear.
But we are only truly vulnerable apart from God.
In the beginning God made humans. God made us special – in His own Image. God made us with His Own Hands, and gave us His own breath. Here on earth He made a special place for us to live – The Garden. This we left. Before God made us, or that Garden, “before the foundations of the world” (Matthew 25.34), he had prepared a permanent, heavenly home for his children. Then he sent his only begotten Son to provide a way home (John 14:1-7). Now he waits to see if we will return home to Him.
As full as the prophetic literature is with pronouncements of judgments, God made just as clear, through his prophets, that he wanted nothing more than His children should return home to Him. From God in Hosea anguishing “How can I give you up, O Ephraim, How can I surrender you O Israel… My hear is turned over within Me,”(Hosea 11:8), to his command in Isaiah that the north, south, east and west to “Bring my sons from afar, and my daughters from the ends of the earth,” (Isaiah 43:5-6), God makes his yearning for us clear.
One could say that the entire Bible is a store of separation and homecoming, that the Prodigal Son Story (Luke 15:11-32) is the entire Bible encapsulated. A child belongs home. We are God’s children. We belong home with Him. Apart from God we are the helpless child, alone in the callous crowd.
