Monday, May 05, 2008

• Where Are They Now?

  It's hard to watch someone fall away.  The loss I feel when I lose a friend to walking the wrong path is greater than the loss I've felt when I lost a friend to death.  I don't think I've had a close friend yet who died not knowing the Lord.  I don't know what that would feel like.  But every once in a while, I lose a friend to a death of a different kind.  A spiritual death.  It's infrequent, but still too often.
  
  I'm slowly beginning to face the reality that my mentor in college is gone.  His heart is gone.  The things I hear about him are not qualities of the man that I knew -- that man that inspired me, motivated me, challenged me, whom without I'd have resented a lot of my circumstances.  He helped me believe in myself.  He taught me how to be both a leader and a follower.  He showed me how to love the process even if I don't like the end result.  He encouraged me to be proud of what I accomplish.  Then he went and named what was once the "Robert F. Kennedy Award" after me.  He was once the most influential man in my life apart from my own father.  I still often see the effects of what I learned from him.
  
  But he is not who I once admired and respected.  I knew him as a family man, who loved his wife and kids.  Now I understand him to be the opposite of that.  He'd take time out to chat with anyone about anything, but now he doesn't respond to hardly anyone's calls or e-mails -- even and especially mine.  He makes promises he doesn't fulfill.  He doesn't encourage.  It sounds like he has no joy anymore though I'll never forget the sound of his laughter.  His recent behavior could be described as self-centered and self-gratifying when I knew him as a selfless individual who made incredible sacrifices for me and others.  He had trust and faith in people before he had any reason to.  It seems now like he lives behind stone walls, cold and inaccessible.  I feel like I have to apologize to people who talk about him now, and say, "I'm sorry you didn't get the chance to know him the way I knew him."
  
  I wonder where my friend has gone.  I hope he knows the power he still has to change someone's life.  My life is better because I knew him.  I know there's a wake of people shaking their heads wondering how he's become what he is now.  I don't understand what's happening.
  
  I have a tendency, when I lose a friend to a "Prodigal Child" like situation, to stop praying for them.  It often times is accompanied with a sense of hopelessness, as though I have the foresight to believe they'll never come around.  I attribute that to thinking too much of the freewill God has given to man and not enough of God's ability to move in their hearts.  In other words, I think that because of freewill, it is entirely up to that person to come around rather than God trying to turn them around and God doesn't intervene.  Does that make sense what I'm trying to say?  Of course, God is not going to make us love Him, but the Spirit moves us to Him.  I'm thinking too highly of man and not highly enough of God when I think I can't pray them back to Him.  I myself was struck from that first quote in my previous post that says, "Every soul who is saved is saved because someone -- who would not give him up to Satan -- prayed."  I wonder who's praying for my friend.  Whether or not I have to ask that, it should be me.
  
  I wrote this song about a year ago -- the last song I wrote for my latest CD.  It has become the anthem of those I was once close to but now move, as Michael W. Smith once put it, "to the beat of different drums."  When these lyrics come back to me, I feel that tightness in my chest as prevalent as it felt when I first wrote it.  The person that initially inspired it is still gone.  I need to overcome that hesitation to pray for my prodigal child friends...
  
  I don't know what made you walk away
  So many things were never said
  Now I'm looking back at yesterday
  From the empty space you left
  
  You're out there on your own
  He's calling you back home
  You have not been heard from in a while
  His arms are open wide
  He's missing you tonight
  He's waiting here to welcome His child
  
  It's so hard to watch your heart unwind
  Some days I wish we'd never met
  But when I try to get you out of my mind
  I pray you back to me instead
  
  You're out there on your own
  He's calling you back home
  You have not been heard from in a while
  His arms are open wide
  He's missing you tonight
  He's waiting here to welcome His child
  
  Isaiah 53:6 "All we, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all."
  

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