all the way home

[5 minutes]

Thirty six years ago a baby boy was born in the same city where I first spotted the girl I would marry and who would later be his mommy. That baby was born to someone else, but that someone already gave him up to Jesus so that we could have the rapturous joy of bringing him home. That was then.

He was the answer to his mama’s many prayers and the happy surprise of his disabled daddy. He’s perfect, we said. All his fingers and toes and not a flaw to be seen. He actually favored me. I had only wanted daughters, not a son, but he changed all that with my first look. That was then.

Graham learned how to walk by steadying a pudgy hand on my wheelchair tire, trailing trustingly along as I s l o w l y rolled across the living room floor, him putting one foot gingerly in front of the other. His favorite way to travel was to perch himself between my legs and ride on my footrests, giggling and bouncing at the world in front of him. We were Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. Speed Racer and Chim-Chim. My favorite way for him to ride was when Gra-Gra climbed on my lap, pulled himself upright, facing me. When he grabbed a fistful of my shirt and pumped his legs up and down, that was my signal. Off we went, doing wheelies and spinning and carving donuts in the carpet. That was then.

We could take him anywhere. He smiled at everybody he saw and they usually smiled back. Our little guy loved to sing Jesus songs and was never off-pitch. He made friends easily. He told other little boys on the McDonald’s playground about Jesus. He loved church, he loved his cousins, and he loved Christmas and Halloween and birthdays and pretty much any other day of the year. That was then.

The boy could pick up any instrument and learn how to play it by ear. Like his mama, music was inside him and moved him. He wasn’t a great student, didn’t have the handwriting skills of his mother, but he was the spark of life in every classroom. From kindergarten through elementary school, he was rewarded as the student with the most personality, aka class clown. That was then.

The angels God assigned to our Graham had their hands full. Rambunctious, daring, and always scoping out the next epic adventure, we never knew for sure if we had a tight enough hold on him. He was so adaptable, which is a good thing on the one hand, but not always on the other. Don’t get me wrong; Graham wasn’t a troublemaker, but trouble often found him anyway. That was then.

He gave his heart to Jesus before he became a teenager. I may have mentioned it earlier, but our son didn’t shy away from telling people about Jesus. He went on mission trips, laid hands on people and prayed for their healing, traveled hut to hut with the gospel, and left his only pair of shoes in Honduras for another who had no shoes. That was then.

Prodigals aren’t as rare as you’d think. Especially not the ones who grew up in pastor’s homes. Like many of us, Graham had high hopes but he got mad at a God whom he accused of ruining his dreams. He didn’t know what to do with that, where to take all that anger. It molested him, throttled him, imprisoned him. He became addicted to it, wore it all on both sleeves, and it became the death of him. That was then.

The thing about God’s mercy is that it keeps following us and hounding us and nipping at our heels. All the way home, the psalm says. All. The. Way. Home. God’s lovingkindness never lets up. I shared with another parent of a prodigal just this week the same words that encouraged Sandy and me when our beautiful son died: the power and strength and determined will of God’s hold on us is eternally stronger than our will to walk away from him.

The other thing about prodigals is that some of them, perhaps more than we think, come home. Graham sure did.

God’s merciful love did that. It followed him all the way home, praise Jesus.

Graham would be 36 today. Sandy is in Georgia this week to celebrate still being his mom. She has many things on her docket, but none more important than sitting by Graham’s graveside and reminiscing about all the “that was then” moments. It’s been almost twelve years now, but still we grieve — and that’s okay. Some years are harder than others to celebrate his birthday while mourning his passing. This is one of those years. Sigh.

Were it not for the rich mercies of Christ Jesus, we might just stay by his cemetery plot and never leave, chained to unremedied sorrow. But a hope greater than our grieving is beating in our chests and beckoning us on. We can drive away from that plot of ground, assured and at peace, because there’s a new now, not then, past the veil and scrim of this side of eternity, where Graham is waiting for us to get Home too.

Selah, beloved.

who told you?

“Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”

Genesis 3:11

[7 minutes]

There is a crisis of information today. No, not the lack of it, because, as we all well know, there are no limits to where we can find whatever we’re looking for whenever we need it. Alexa, how long does it take to boil an egg in the microwave? Hey Siri, what was the primary reason for the downfall of the Roman Empire?

Our appetite for knowledge is appeased through Google, ChatGPT, X, Apple News, Wikipedia, YouTube, Waze, Food Network, Zillow, and a thousand other sources as close to us as our devices. We are glutted with real-time data from every direction.

Suffering from the tyranny of FOMO, we bathe ourselves in digital light, robotically taking in whatever it feeds us — good or bad — for hours on end. Like junkies, our habit is fixed by mainlining content that is killing our souls. The Matrix is changing us from being made in God’s image to beings who slither around on our bellies like snakes.

In the beginning, God was the only source of information. So when the Lord asked Adam, “Who told you?” the latter had to sheepishly admit to going off-script and getting hoodwinked by misinformation.

It all falls apart in Genesis 3. The First Man on planet earth had barely gotten his feet under him before he believed the lie and, tragically, became the lie itself.

who told you God can’t be trusted?

The sin underneath all our sins is to trust the lie of the serpent that we cannot trust the love and grace of Christ.
—Martin Luther

Thanks to the Original Couple, we have embedded inside us the default mechanism to accuse God of being spartanly unfair or cruel. It’s a constant battle for many to quell the urge to instinctively blame God for their misfortunes.

I find it telling that the first book in our Bibles — chronologically, that is — is not Genesis, but Job. Of course Adam and Eve walked the earth long before he did, but Job preceded the writer of Genesis by a long shot. If we can trust the dating of Job, and I believe we can, then it asks the oldest question of all: If God is so good then why do I hurt so badly?

Now you can see why Moses opened the canon with Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch. Each of those first five books provides a master class for people who have a background of suffering and struggling to “not go there” when they are tempted to believe the lie that God cannot be trusted:

This is God. This is who he is. This is how he is to be worshiped. This is how he is to be trusted. Yes, bad things happen. We know this all too well! But God is not the villain in our story; he is fighting for us and faithfully planning our blessed future.”

Job fought that same urge and won. Moses had to do battle against the devil’s lie in Midian no doubt, but he overcame and led the people of Israel to leave Egypt and overcome in the wilderness. Those who didn’t make it were those who never got the taste of Egypt’s fruit out of their mouths.

One of my daily follows on X (Twitter) posted this recently and I thought it captured quite well the common struggle of mankind:

What good is the apple when one bite makes your life a living hell?

who told you God made you inferior?

In the first page of Holy writ we are told that humans are made in God’s image, in His likeness. By page two, Adam and Eve are no longer satisfied with that and looking for an upgrade.

The present culture has bullied impressionable minds to think they are not enough. Social media influencers, cultural icons, and even medical professionals have convinced an entire generation they are born wrong, look wrong, or believe wrong.

None of it is new. The satan has been using the same tactics to mar the imago dei in us since the beginning. He laughs at our gullibility. He loves to see us stripped of glory and dressed in fig leaves.

Babies are blobs of cells.

Children are an inconvenience.

Old people are a nuisance.

All men are misogynists.

Women are sex objects.

Gender is fluid.

Fathers aren’t necessary.

Families are a capitalistic construct.

We love our labels. Many of our labels serve no other purpose but to depersonalize others and erase the imago dei from their beingness. And the devil laughs.

who told you God was finished with you?

Did you think your shame defined you?

Did you think it was over for you?

Did you think you were beyond saving?

Adam and Eve were painfully aware they were now defective. The shine wore off. The original pair were like those brand new cars you drive off the lot that depreciate immediately.

This is why humans “cover” themselves with things that hide their weaknesses.

We become defensive.

We have learned how to hide our wounds to avoid the proper remedy.

We become deceptive.

We have learned to lie and, by so doing, have become the lie itself.

We become destructive.

We will burn down the whole house before admitting we are wrong and coming home.

From that point, once the die is cast, Adam and Eve no longer see the supernatural. They can’t see God, they can only hear him coming. Their souls weren’t the only thing that went dark; their eyes went dark too.

But, as it is written,
“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the heart of man imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love him”—
these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.
1 Corinthians 2:9-10

But God, in grace, made sure they knew his approach. We are told the very first words after the Fall were spoken by God:

“Where are you?”

He came seeking us. There’s grace in those words! Where are you? They imply they were somewhere they should not be but they still mattered enough for God to come looking for them. It’s the same for every human since.

You’ve messed up but you’re not irredeemable.

Your situation is not the end of the story.

We can’t hide too long without having to come out and face the music. It will catch up with us. We will eventually be outed. Better to come forward than die in the dark.

In Christ, we are not pursued like wanted criminals, but like wanted children, or like wanted lovers, because wrath is replaced by desire.
— Rachel Gilson

Don’t allow the voices and narratives of culture shape who you are. It’s fake news. Some of it has just enough truth to make it sound authentic, but it’s still a lie.

Beloved, God is not done with you. Wherever you’re hiding, whatever you’re trying to cover yourself up with to impersonate the imago dei, just stop. You may not see him, but he sees you.

I’m willing to bet you’re hearing his approach in these words. Why are you here? Who told you these lies? Come out, come back, come home. He’s calling you back to truer things than you’ll ever hear out there.

Selah, beloved.

can I still miss you?

My last Father’s Day with my son. Graham was leading worship at The Garden and in the doing revealed who he really was, deep down.

beautiful boy

you died too young but just in time

::apparently::

it was a mercy to wrest you free

from the powers that sieged your walls and

stormed your gates.

you’re safe now, son, from axis threat –

the missiles spreading fire to your soul.

now lay you down on golden hills

wrapped in Arms

that shield from harm,

but

can i still miss you?

oh!

come wind and fire,

come tempest, ire

you’ll not reach my boy where he now knows life

and

where he waits for me with gleaming skin

for that someday when he’ll come sprinting, laughing, wildly waving

on ::Father’s:: day

at last. it’s all good

but for now – while mourning precedes morning – i’ll still go on missing

what was and

what could be and

::dream::

of the man you are.