THE RETURN

On the way home from work I turn the corner and walk up the long ascent towards our house. From the top of the hill my son used to wait for me, sitting on the wall he could see the entire distance down, and as soon as I turned that corner he would joyously jump to his feet and come running down to meet me halfway. We’d hug and then walk up the hill together. This was our periodic routine for many years.

Every Thursday night I used to meet a good friend for steak, beer and robust conversation at the local pub, and for many years Jai used to ambush me at the front door, wrapping his arms and legs around the bottom half of my leg. It took some doing to unclasp him and scuttle out the door before he reattached.

Of course Jai is getting older and there’s homework and basketball and as he tells me; a busy social calendar. He no longer meets me halfway up the hill and at the front door, but the memory of his enthusiasm for his dad is imprinted inside my waxy self, because that’s how I feel about my heavenly dad.

Every day I proverbially sit on this wall and wait for Him to turn that corner, when I would see Him again. I peer intently down this hill, anticipating the joyous gush in my heart, the jump and the sprint to meet Him halfway because of my enthusiasm for Him and most especially his Son Jesus Christ, my personal Saviour and returning Monarch.

I look for and read what I can of others’ similar eagerness when that return might be. My dreams are occasionally filled with an overwhelming sense of the imminence of eminence. I watch the news and look for signs which might signal the escalation of turmoil and violence to usher in the final whistle – the ‘last trump’. I worry about my antediluvian friends and live in the hope that they will be counted amongst the mass tribulation saints post the rapture.

More and more I turn my ear to the words of the new rising Levitical priesthood – Messianic Rabbis – who speak increasingly of a return wrapped in the principle of the Jubilee found in the book of Leviticus – significant events every fifty years. How in recent times Israel’s Kingdom was returned to them in 1917, after exactly seven 50 year periods of Islamic occupation. How fifty years later Jerusalem was returned to Israel in 1967, the exact year of the greatest archaeological find when the Jewish nation’s Word was returned to them in the Dead Sea Scrolls. How fifty years later the United Nations recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in 2017 and how all these events mirror an exact reversal of ancient times, leaving the only thing left, the imminent return of the King in this the fortieth fifty-year period since Christ ascended the mount of Olives.

In parallel I read of the return to Rome as prophesied in the book of Daniel. How the world will and are returning to Roman practices of paganism. How newborn children are unconscionably abandoned as they were under ruthless Caesars, and how hostilities against Christians have been escalating, making these latter years the worst in torturing Christians in 2000 years.

Part of this descent into paganism is the increase of anxiety in what appears to be the age of protests, systemic in the lack of praising God. Angst about climate change signalling a lack of belief in a God sovereign over the planet He made. The gradual extinction of our animals as substitutionary sacrifice because of nations’ sins not atoned for through Christ. Wild weather entirely blamed on the neglect of our planet when the book of Job explicitly calls these calamities from our adversary. As water disappears from our land people still will not bow to the source of the rains. The world continually receives false answers to the wrong questions and so miss the principle of the Jubilee on their lives – the call to return.

Someone recently asked me why I believe in God. I told him that I don’t believe in God, but that I believe God. I trust everything He tells me in His word and otherwise. There is nothing else worth relying on more. The Lord tells me I should pray that I escape all that is to come and so I do this continually for myself, my wife and children.

My estimation of Him grows year on year so that any shrapnel of hostility towards Him is met with utter violence, bringing in line affirmative and truthful words about Him, even if it appears feebly so. When everything else waxes and wanes, assembles and disassembles, He remains my highest good.

And while men and women around me desire an unfailing love in the subtext of their endeavours and conversations, with Him I am always in love. With Him and in Him “I sing, I dance, rejoicing in this divine romance.”

I am fifty, and like Humpty Dumpty for the umpteenth time I sit on this proverbial wall and wait for Him to turn that corner, when I would see Him again, when the King Himself will put me, and all of us, back together again.