Gold Nugget
Verse 28: “Then
they will call on me, but I will not answer; they will seek me diligently,
but they will not find me.”
Commentary
A man at work once
told me of the relationship between him and his dad. After a severe
disagreement as a teenager, he left home and refused to communicate with dad
for years. Even though he knew he was in the wrong, he felt like he needed to
teach his father a lesson through shunning him. For the first year, he refused
his father’s attempts to reconcile. He told me that he didn’t intend to shun
him forever, but somehow the years began to stack up. Five years turned into
ten years and so on. Eventually, the family accepted the son’s apparent decision
to never speak to his father again. After a while his pride owned him and even
his inner desire to reconcile was overruled by years of hardness. After the
death of his mother, his father remarried and moved out of state. Somehow, even
though there wasn’t anything improper about his father’s decision to remarry,
it made it easier to maintain his boycott of his father. As the years passed
and he became a father and then a grandfather, he really came to understand how
innocent his own father had been for all those years. Finally, he decided to
make peace with him. Even though he now wanted to make peace, he knew that he
would have to absorb years of foolish behavior. He just couldn’t bring himself
to admit such horrible actions. He figured that as long as he did it before his
father died, everything would be okay. One day he got the news that his father
had cancer and wasn’t expected to live very long. He knew that time was short,
but a new scenario rose within him. He felt that a confession of years of
rejection to his father while on his death bed would appear dramatic and
possibly unfair to his father and the rest of the family. So he didn’t. As it turned
out, he never made contact with him before he died. After his father died, he
felt like it wouldn’t be right to attend his funeral since he didn’t attend his
life. This man that I work with wore a face of sorrow that I couldn’t bring
peace to with my best efforts. This man had missed the window of opportunity to
make peace with his dad on several occasions. I can’t help but think of this
man’s story and how it relates to the rejection so many practice towards their Creator
God. They do like today’s “gold nugget” speaks of, “Then they will call on me, but
I will not answer; they will seek me diligently, but they will not find me.” People may not want to acknowledge
it, but we only have so many windows of opportunity to call on Him before those
opportunities are no more. One day, our lives will be over and it may be sooner
or later. In addition to that, we don’t know the day or the hour, but when we
expect it least, He will return to take to Himself His own. At that point, all
windows will be closed.
Prayer
Lord, help us to keep from being deceived into
postponing our decision to make peace with you. Remind us that years of
rejecting you does not make our heart grow founder, but instead colder. Amen
If you are reading this
devotional in an e-mail and would like to post a comment, click on this link http://proverbfortoday.org/
No comments:
Post a Comment