The human mind is amazing. We store all manner of events and conversations only to have them come flooding back with the right stimulus. This evening I noticed a full page Citicard advertisement in a magazine with the message, “You didn’t come this far to go somewhere else.” My mental floodgate opened to a conversation with a student a few years ago. Something very discouraging had happened to him and he told me he was giving up on God and Jesus and the church. He had been raised a Christian and I said to him, “You didn’t come this far to go somewhere else.”
Really bad things do happen along our ways and the last thing we want to happen is to allow ourselves to give up. Truthfully, life can be a slimy mess. It is not a bed of roses just because one is a Christian. But that does not mean Jesus doesn’t love you and that God doesn’t care. Giving up on the promises, no longer believing that Jesus is going to make it alright, deliberately choosing and changing one’s lifestyle to an inferior way of living, just doesn’t make sense. “You didn’t come this far to go somewhere else.”
Why would someone deliberately choose to begin harmful habits and abandon grace and the assurance that there is more to life than these few decades? Following Jesus and what He counsels and offers is a superior way of living. Dare I say, “One might give up on a religious organization, but that is totally different than giving up on Jesus. They are not one in the same.”
I vividly remember saying to my student, “Don’t go somewhere else. Being with Jesus is life at its best!”
Spring Of Life