What happens when you search for God with all your heart?
According to Scripture and personal experience, you find God.
You will seek me and find me when you search for me with all your heart. (Jeremiah 29:13 CSB)
Is there a pattern for this journey back to God? Or is everyone’s journey unique?
The answer is a resounding, yes. Yes there is a pattern, but everyone’s journey is also unique.
In Finding Your Way Back to God, Dave and Jon Ferguson have uncovered five universal awakenings that humans journey though as they find their way back to God. And as you’ll see through the stories that I’ll share from the book here, everyone’s journey is truly unique. So buckle up and get ready. These stories will help you see that as much as we need to find our way back to God, “God wants to be found even more than you want to find him.” [1]
1. Awakening to Longing: “There’s got to be more.”
Each of the five awakenings are summarized with a prayer. Here’s the prayer for this first awakening,
“God, if you are real, make yourself real to me. Awaken in me the ability to see that you are what’s missing from my life.” [2]
Let me share with you one of the stories from the book that perfectly illustrate the way that we can find our way back to God through this awakening to longing.
Several years ago I had dinner with my friend and mentor Bob Buford. For much of his life, Bob ran a successful cable television company. After his son, Ross, tragically died, Bob came to a point in his life he called “Halftime.” He wrote a book by that title that tells how he moved from focusing on success to focusing on significance. What Bob said at dinner has stayed with me ever since: “One of people’s great fears is running out of money, but that’s not their greatest fear. Another significant fear people have is the fear of dying, but that’s not people’s greatest fear either.” He paused and said, “Deep down, our single greatest fear is to live a life of insignificance, to come to the end of our life and feel like we never really did anything that mattered. That is our greatest fear.”
Are you feeling like you are stuck in the same old, same old? Do you have a gut feeling that there’s got to be more? Author and theologian Frederick Buechner points us in the right direction when he says, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” [3]
2. Awakening to Regret: “I wish I could start over.”
“God if you are real, make yourself real to me. Awaken in me the possibility that with you I could start over again.” [4]
In this second section of the book, there is a compelling story about Scott and Kirsten, and the changes they chose to make after awakening to regret.
Scott and Kirsten were overachievers. They both had graduate degrees, were making the kind of money that put them in the top 1 percent, and lived with their two sons in a community that was deemed “the best community in the United States to raise a family.” They thought they had figured out what life was all about. But they were living a bios kind of life, just one day after another that offered no purpose or cause bigger than themselves or their suburban home. The disillusionment became disappointment, and the disappointment grew into a deep depression and regret. Something had to change.
In a moment of prayer, these words came into Kirsten’s mind: “I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.” The words were from a story Jesus told. It spurred Kirsten and her husband to start talking about what a change in priority might look like in their lives.
Over the next five years, they sold their home, changed jobs, and moved into an under-resourced neighborhood to live alongside people who are marginalized and forgotten. Scott became a schoolteacher in a poorly performing elementary school. Kirsten launched a thriving compassion and justice non-profit that mobilizes thousands of volunteers. One of the most significant risks they took was moving their two elementary-age boys into a school district with a bare-bones budget, few extracurricular activities, and a growing gang problem. Scott and Kirsten will tell you that their boys have thrived. In Kirsten’s words, “We thought we were making sacrifices, but the truth is, we are living a better life not than ever before!”
In his book The Irresistible Revolution, Shane Claiborne says that the question of life after death is still significant, but what people are wondering most about is “whether there is life before death.” [5]
3. Awakening to Help: “I can’t do this on my own.”
“God if you are real, make yourself real to me. Awaken in me the willingness to turn toward you for help.” [6]
This third awakening is best illustrated through the story of Christa.
Her name was Christa, and she grew up on a small cherry farm in Traverse City, Michigan. She was a wild child who dismissed her parents as old-fashioned because of how they responded to her piercings and tattoos. One night Christa and her parents had a huge fight. At the end of it, she slammed the door and said, “I hate you,” then acted on a plan she had been rehearsing for months in her mind. She ran away to the big city of Detroit.
Within a few hours of arriving in Detroit, she met a man who seemed warm and nice. He drove the most expensive car she’d ever seen, and he was willing to take her in. This nice man taught her a few things that would make her valuable on the streets, and because Christa was young, she brought in top dollar for her services. As time went on, and as she got a little older, she wasn’t bringing in top dollar anymore, and so she was thrown out on the street, with no money and a drug habit to support.
One night she thought back to those sunny spring days when she would be lying beneath the cherry trees. Realizing that renting her body on the streets of Detroit was no way to live, she decided she would head north, and maybe move to Canada and start over. On her way north, she figured she’d try something that she thought had no chance of actually working. She mustered up enough courage to give her parents a call. No one answered, but she left a message telling them she was going to be passing through Traverse City on her way to Canada. If they wanted to see her, she would be at the bus station around midnight. After hanging up, she thought leaving the message was a stupid thing to do because odds were they were happier now that she was gone.
As the bus headed north, she could see the signs saying the bus was getting closer to Traverse City…Finally the bus arrived in Traverse City, and she heard the bus driver say, “Fifteen minutes at this stop, fifteen minutes.”
All her mental rehearsing didn’t prepare her for what she should when she stepped off the bus. At midnight in this small-town bus depot, she found dozens of familiar faces belonging to aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents…and a huge banner hanging from the walls saying, “WELCOME HOME, CHRISTA!!!” Her dad broke through the crowd and ran up to her, and as she tried to explain herself, he wrapped his arms around her, making it clear that all he really cared about was that his daughter was home. [7]
4. Awakening to Love: “God loves me deeply after all.”
“God, if you are real, make yourself real to me. Awaken in me the awareness that I am your unconditionally loved child.” [8]
Leslie’s story demonstrates that while you can’t change your past, God can change your future.
Shame held Leslie captive most of her life. She was ashamed of her dad, who was a compulsive gambler. She was ashamed of her mother, who had a string of affairs with married men during Leslie’s growing-up years. She felt shame because of her own two divorces. She felt guilty when an ex-husband killed himself. Shame haunted her after the abortion she had when she was forty. Leslie said, “Shame was my prison, and it kept me hiding from the only One who could forgive me and set me free.”
When Leslie courageously told her story for the first time, the light of grace began to filter into her darkness. As her friend listened closely to everything she had done and everything that had been done to her–those two sources of shame I identified earlier–she said, “Leslie, you can’t change your past, but God can change your future.” Those words were like a key unlocking her from a prison of shame and opening the door to a brand-new life.
Over the next several years, Leslie found her way back to God. She came to understand that her identity was not in what she had done or in what had been done to her. She says, “I am God’s dearly loved child. Period.”
At times she still thinks, I don’t deserve this. But she also hears God’s voice saying, “Whatever you’ve done, you are forgiven and you are loved.” Today Leslie is helping other woman who struggle with pain in their past to find their way back to God.
Do not let your past mistakes and failures define you. That is the voice of shame. You aren’t what you’ve done or not done. You are not what’s been done to you.You are who God says you are. His child. [9]
5. Your Awakening to Life: “Now this is living!”
“God if you are real, make yourself real to me. Awaken in me the confidence that I can live a brand-new life.” [10]
This last awakening illustrates the kind of life that God desires all of us to live…right now.
Eight years ago I sat in Lane’s living room where hospice workers had placed a bed to make him comfortable for his last days on this earth. He asked me to come over because it was time to plan his funeral. As he told me what he wanted to have said, sung, and celebrated at his memorial, I couldn’t help but think back to just a few years earlier when Lane found his way back to God.
Lane was a type-A, driven personality who would start his workday at 5 a.m. and not finish till late in the evening. His obsessive hard work paid off as his company went from being a $100-million business when he started to being worth more than $9 billion when he stepped down because of a terminal illness. The illness brought this ambitious workaholic to a complete stop. When Lane paused long enough to reflect on his life and success, he realized there was something very important missing.
As a kid, his parents took him to church and he had a genuine faith in God, but Lane realized that in his unbridled pursuit of success, God had gradually become a faint and forgotten memory. That was when we met.
Lane was sick. The kind of sick that would slowly kill him. But until it did kill him, it would torture his body with constant pain sixteen hours a day. The illness was his wake-up call that something was missing and he needed God. Lane told me, “Dave, the best thing that ever happened to me was getting sick. From the time I got sick, it refocused me. It caused me to find my way back to God and feel so close to God. I would give up everything for what I have now.”
I still have the notes for Lane’s funeral. They have gone unused. It has been nearly a decade since hospice was called, and Lane hasn’t died yet. But neither has Lane been cured. He is in pain every day of his life and only has energy to go out for a meal and spend a little time online exchanging e-mails. Since his spiritual rebirth, Lane has also found a new identity. He’s not a workaholic creating his own kingdom. Instead he is a messenger sharing his story and helping others find their way back to God. [11]
Is God real to you?
I want to encourage you to seek God by praying these five prayers. Open your heart and mind to God. He wants to be found and he wants to have a relationship with you.
At the end of Finding Your Way Back to God, there is a 30-day journal and prayer guide that will help you process these five awakenings so that you can find your way back to God.
Pick up a copy today here. Your life will never be the same.
Endnotes:
[1] Dave and Jon Ferguson, Finding Your Way Back to God: Five Awakenings to Your New Life (Colorado Springs: Multnomah Books, 2015), 2.
[2] Ibid., 29.
[3] Ibid., 44-45.
[4] Ibid., 61.
[5] Ibid., 67-68.
[6] Ibid., 92.
[7] Ibid., 90-91.
[8] Ibid., 118.
[9] Ibid., 120-121.
[10] Ibid., 137.
[11] Ibid., 161-162.
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