I still remember my first-time reading Jeremiah 2-3.
“I myself said,” ‘How gladly would I treat you like sons and give you a desirable land, the most beautiful inheritance of any nation.’ I thought you would call me ‘Father’ and not turn away from following me. But like a woman unfaithful to her husband, so you have been unfaithful to me, O house of Israel,” declares the Lord.
Jeremiah 3:19-20
It was a few months into an SCJ Bible study course. The bus ride home that day felt especially heavy. It wasn’t a bad kind of heavy, but the kind you feel after you’ve been underwater for too long. Like when your chest is heaving as it works to fill your lungs with air.
I was crying, though I wasn’t sure why. The tears were relentless, and as the cityscape rushed past outside the window, I was brought back to a memory that had been subconsciously tucked away in the back of my mind.
Suddenly, I was in high school again. A socially awkward teenager at yet another church retreat I had been half-forced to attend. I had just mustered up the courage to confess that I’d never really felt God’s love before. That I didn’t know what it was supposed to feel like. In response, my small-group leader tried to explain God’s love to me based on her personal experience. But as she was doing so, she grew more and more visibly frustrated that I just wasn’t getting it.
I don’t blame her. It wasn’t her fault that something so real and tangible to her was something I had never experienced. At the time, however, this only added to the envy I had always felt towards the elite church crowd that seemed to be so in tune with God. And it amplified the shame and guilt that accompanied me to every church event I ever attended. I never knew what I was doing. I was only feigning a certainty in my faith so that I could pass as a “good” Christian.
Responses like this—to questions I had about the Bible, about God, and about Christianity—were what made me think that maybe…I just hadn’t been chosen. What else could explain the fact that I could never “get it”? Eventually, I ended up doing what was once unthinkable for me as a pastor’s kid. I left the church. Thinking back, I know now that it was because I had based my whole life of faith on emotions. And those had never lasted long enough to commit them to meaningful memory. I had no real knowledge of God that could serve as a foundation for my faith.
And that was the difference. The churches that I had grown up in tried to convince me of God’s love through other people’s personal truths. But how can the “truth” be true to only a certain group of people? At this Bible study, I was being shown God’s love through Scripture. I learned about the way He kept His promises, even when His people didn’t. And the way He still longed for them to return, even after they had turned against Him and had forsaken Him.
So as the bus drove over those uneven city roads, I cried for God’s heartbreak. I cried for the way He had to plead with His children to return. And I cried for the people who would still refuse to come back. I realized that for the first time in my life, I had been shown a glimpse of who God truly is. I didn’t need to feel God’s love. He had already proven it time and time again throughout His 66-book-long love letter to us.
I think it was then that I made up my mind not to break His heart ever again by turning away.
No matter where you are or what you have done, God will call you back to Him to the very end. I hope you find it in your heart to heed that call and return to Him.
“Return, faithless people,” declares the Lord, “for I am your husband. I will choose you-one from a town and two from a clan-and bring you to Zion.
Jeremiah 3:14
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