Always Pursuing. Always Restoring

I have several personality flaws.  I know, great opening for a blog.  :)  But God is reminding me of something through one of them right now that I want to share with you.  Confession time - I have a crazy-unhealthy ability to completely emotionally separate from people whom I perceive don't like me.  In other words, if I believe that you don't want to be around me or don't approve of me, I can emotionally detach from you darn near immediately.  I am confident that a counselor somewhere would say that it came from experiences in my childhood, but that is not where I am going with this.  

I have found, and I bet you have too, that we expect God to relate to us like we relate to others.  For years, I have harbored this secret fear that if I strayed away from God, He will wash his hands of me and be done with me too.  But I have been reminded over the last 24 hours that He is not like that at all.  

He is a God who is in constant pursuit of us and when we stray from Him, He pursues us even harder.  I seriously have zero frame of reference for that, so it blows my mind to think about.  

Yesterday, my Facebook home page blew up with friends sharing Kathie Lee Gifford's tribute to her late husband, Frank Gifford.  If you haven't seen it, you should watch it HERE.  In it Kathie says, "He strayed from his faith on occasion but his faith never left him."   I loved that.  She didn't cover up that Frank was, at times, a flawed man but she instead pointed to a God who was continually drawing Frank back to Himself with complete grace and forgiveness.  

Then today, I opened my She Reads Truth email. Of course the topic was how God pursued the people of Babylon.  The writer says it perfectly with, "Jeremiah revealed the promise of the God who pursues, engages and rescues— the God who doesn’t simply replace what sin and its consequences burn away, but who restores the very heart of the sinner. As the people of Israel sat weeping by the waters of Babylon as they remembered their homeland (Psalm 137:1), they were not forgotten by their God.  They were called back and gathered up."
You can read the entire post HERE.

Friends, I want to encourage you with the same truth that I have been encouraged with this week.  We don't have a flawed relationship with a God who is capable of walking away at any moment.  No.  We serve a God who is continually pursuing us.  That, my friends, is blow-your-mind amazing.