Returning Home
"The whole course of the spiritual life is falling off, and returning, slipping away from the truth and turning back to it, leaving and returning. So in our leaving, as much as in our returning, we must try to remember that we are blessed, loved, cherished, and waited for by the One whose love doesn't change."
Home Tonight Henri Nouwen
I had a funeral today to attend for the mother of a friend of mine. She died from stage 4 lung cancer. She told her daughter a few hours before she died that she was indeed ready to go, and that she wanted to go home to Jesus. Her daughter wanting her mother's suffering to be over told her to tell that to Jesus, to tell him that she was ready. She did that and Jesus took her home.
When I was a small child, I was sick many times. I remember reading a story in the doctor's waiting office of a small child that was also very sick. This child in the story was dying and his mother told him that he needed to go to sleep with his hand up in the air so that Jesus could take him home when his time of suffering was over. After reading that story, I remember nights that I slept with my hand propped up in the air with a pillow just in case it was my time.
In the prodigal son, the son's return to his father was the end to his suffering.
His father looked at him with loving eyes, taking his son into his arms, crying with him as the child looked to the father to end his pain. His father rejoicing in his son's return celebrated that his son had come home.
When we return to God after a period of leaving, we return with humility, with humbleness, with only the clothes on our backs, and we are welcomed back with open arms by the One who never turned away from us. We find that we are cherished, loved and blessed by the only One who can give us what we truly need, unconditional acceptance and end to our suffering. God simply waits for us to return when we leave. Our Creator wants us to give over and let go of our pain. God's love is always there and never changes. The love that heals. Our healing is just a "return" away.
