Prone to wander,
Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the
God I love;Here's my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.
At the time, the
thought was comforting in its confirmation that I was not alone. It was later, in my early twenties, of the
discovery that it was an echo of the apostle Paul’s words and a reminder that I
was not the only believer stumbling along the way of Christ: "I do not understand my own
actions. For I do not do what I want,
but I do the very thing I hate....I can will what is right, but I cannot do
it" (Romans 7:15,18). In my
struggle to live up to the designation of Christ-follower, I could, in good
company, admit my condition before God and pray for God's help.
Yet far more than
the assurance that the Christian religion is a religion filled with people who
struggle, I am assured by the promise of God in the midst of that struggle, in
the midst of weakness and wandering. In
the words of the Belgic Confession, Article, 17: "[O]ur good God...set out
to find humanity, though humanity, trembling all over, was fleeing from
God." At the deepest levels of my
humanity, it is true that I am prone to wander, prone to sin, prone to flee
from God, but remarkably, that it was in my deepest state of ruin, my deepest
plunge into sinfulness, when God stepped forward, unwilling to let me remain in
such a state. The image is beautiful:
"God proves his love for me in that while I still a sinner Christ died for
me." Long before I could even
articulate my lostness, God in his mercy set out to find me, setting forth a
plan to make right within me all that is awry.
In this, I have discovered that faith itself, like the accomplishment of Christ on the Cross, is a gift given not out of my own merit, but out of the heart of God. I have been brought to believe by the power of the Spirit and the God who opened my eyes to the work of Christ in the first place. Thus, even in my struggle to live as I believed a faithful Christian should live is in fact the very promise of God's presence to my troubled young adult mind.
Yes, there are still times I have entertained thoughts of regret that I have wandered, in my
deep despair that I have fallen away from God, but it is also the sign of God all along, who has never
left. The Holy Spirit perhaps is
convicting me to draw nearer and away from whatever has caused me to notice a
separation, but in this, God was the one convicting—not my list of rules or the
expectations of the church. My
conviction only serves as a sign that God has followed where I wandered.
Whether the Spirit
is calling my attention to a faith that could see even more or calling me to
remove an obstacle I have placed before the Cross, God is near. Psalms 139 assures me; though I wander and
doubt, though I attempt to flee from God's presence or settle at the farthest
limits of the sea, even here, God's hand upholds the wanderer.
The story of
redemption is the story of a good Father who delights in giving his children
good gifts. In words that continue to
encourage wanderers like me:
O to grace how great
a debtor
Daily I'm
constrained to be!Let that grace now like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander,
Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the
God I love;Here's my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.
The Father has
indeed not only accepted the seal of Christ, but the
Spirit continues to
work this good gift within me, accommodating me in my weakness, calling me
further into the life of the kingdom of God.
