“The man who dies out of Christ is said to be lost, and hardly a word in the English tongue expresses his condition with greater accuracy. He has squandered a rare fortune and at the last he stands for a fleeting moment and looks around, a moral fool, a wastrel who has lost in one overwhelming and irrecoverable loss, his soul, his life, his peace, his total, mysterious personality, his dear and everlasting all.”

— A.W. Tozer.

I read those words this morning while sitting in the drive-thru at McDonalds.  Such thoughts bruise my heart to the point of tears.  I have been thinking about this kind of stuff recently.  I listen for God’s voice.  I heard him this morning while I was waiting for my pancakes at McDonalds.  The words from Tozer upset me and from my heart I told God that I didn’t appreciate having my nose rubbed in the truth.  I know what ultimately happens to people who are apart from God.  I have struggled a long time to get to a place where I have surrendered people to God.  That doesn’t mean that I have given up on them. It means that I recognize that I am completely powerless to help them where their problem truly resides.  In fact anything I did only made the situation worse.  No matter how much I love someone, that love has no power to change their heart.  Only God does that.  I have learned the hard way that as I assisted them through difficulty created by their bad choices I was standing in God’s way.  God said, “Stop doing what you’re doing.  You’re not helping.  You’re making it more difficult.  I know you love them but I love them more.”  To be fair I had to hear that a lot before I listened and was obedient.  The thing that broke me was this:  my strength had failed and I was desperate for relief.  A person may think that once I stepped out of the way that God immediately interceded and did miracles.  He has done nothing in their lives that is apparent to me…but I am changed.  I have seen nothing that leads me to believe that the hearts of the people I love most are turning to God…but he has used them to turn my heart toward him.  It may be that my part in this story is simply to trust God with the hearts of my children.  I have gotten better at not taking ownership of their temporal difficulties.  I am learning how to trust.

Getting back to the painful truth of Tozer’s words.  Over the past few weeks a thought has been circulating through the atmosphere of what is my heart and mind.  The fearful thing about Hell is not the burning flames that are never quenched.  It is not the eternal darkness.  The terror of Hell is to be forever separated from God….forgotten by God.  Imagine the soul who lifts his eyes apart from God and recognizes their complete and utter hopelessness.  What if such a thing were to happen to someone I love?  Jesus says that he is making all things new.  Can I confess that I’m not sure I’m much interested in “all things new” without certain people?  One of the great joys of the final kingdom, at least for me, is to experience people I love as God always intended them to be….unbroken.

….irredeemable loss of ones everlasting all.  ….complete and utter separation from God.  I kneel at the foot of the throne….I see the nail scars on his feet and I beg for their souls..I say “please do something…do something…DO SOMETHING!! Give me something to do…something that won’t impede the process…something meaningful…something that matters….”

The firm hand on my bowed head….then the whisper from his lips to my ear, “You’re doing it right now.”