For the Joy: Chapter 4

 

FOR THE JOY

CHAPTER 4

Hold Fast

He was faithful to Him who appointed Him, as Moses also was in all His house… for every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God… but Christ was faithful as a son over His house—whose house we are, if we hold fast our confidence and the boast of our hope firm until the end. Heb. 3:2

Merciful God…

At this moment one of my people is wayward like the prodigal. The demand for freedom was beginning to cause a break in our relationship, so we gave it. Now this one is gone. In the big world. All. A. lone. Deep inside me there is a disturbance. My child, the one I was assigned to care for, has left the umbrella of my protection. The ache in my heart, the knot in my guts, the spontaneous tears all caught like a hook in the stream of a wayward heart.

I could go and search. I could force the lost one to come home. I could monitor all coming and going. Take the phone and car keys… For what? The wayward path has been chosen. I would only be postponing the inevitable.

On the other hand, I could cut myself off completely. Change the garage code. Lock the doors. Deny my dear one every commodity of being a member of our family, and then wait for a response.

I’ve chosen to take my cues from the father of the prodigal son, who gave his son what he demanded. He conceded. When the repentant boy returned to his father, he was welcomed with open arms.

I’m tempted to worry. I have a knot in my throat that reminds me that all is not well. I am doing the next thing at home, working through my days. But when the day gets quiet, I remember that my lost one is alone in the big world, and I start to worry. Then I pray. “Go and seek, Lord. Break the hardness of heart and bring my dear one into a right relationship with You. And please, in your mercy, bring the lost one home.” The Holy Spirit reminds me to open my hands. This one is not mine to keep. I God is our keeper, both of ours. I am learning to pray with open hands to allow space for the work God must do in both of us.

Hebrews 12:7 says, “It is for discipline that you endure; God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? But if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons… <earthly fathers> disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness. All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.”

I discipline my own children for their good. To keep them safe. To teach them how to function inside the fences of reason, courtesy, consideration, godliness, and dignity.

It has helped me to understand God’s discipline. There must be suffering in order to learn obedience. I’ve always heard people say, “Some people have to learn the hard way,” but it seems like everyone does, to some extent.

I am suffering, and in my suffering, I am learning obedience. I am learning to open my hands. To be more diligent in prayer. To give the Lord my fears, my doubts, my worries, my anxiety as an offering, instead of allowing those things to suffocate my faith.

I keep asking for wisdom. I want to text, call, seek and find. I want this one to know that I am here, but the Holy Spirit is holding me back. I must go silent and leave this one to the wayward path. To feel the aloneness of it. To feel the emptiness. To know what it feels like to be separated from God and family. I pray that God is merciful and that it doesn’t last long. There is much at stake.

I thought I would write about how to manage your household, how to keep things picked up to promote an environment of order. I thought we would exchange recipes and trade ideas that would help us to eat out less and cook more. I thought I would share some marriage and parenting hacks, but that’s not what this is. It is about being faithful until the end. Every word, every prayer I’ve prayed over this book and over you, every thought, every scrawled note, every screenshot in my mind toward this work, is engineered to spur you on to the finish line. I’m compelled to share the underbelly of my life. To tell you what the Bible says, and share how Jesus is the only reason I’m surviving it.

When I started this chapter on suffering, I wrote someone else’s story. My own suffering felt far away. It was like an island out in the ocean, and I was on the mainland, too far away to remember what trees looked like and the air smelled like and how bad the water tasted. I had no idea my own story of suffering was close at hand.

None of this will matter if you don’t finish. None of the sleepless nights you spent all night praying. None of the tattered pages of your Bible, dog-eared and tear-stained from the hours you poured over its pages. None of the times you shared the gospel with someone at the expense of your friendship. None of the years you spent pouring into your children for the sake of the Jesus. None of it. None of it will matter if you don’t endure to the end.

…hold fast our confidence and the boast of our hope first until the end.