Whether we grow up in a nation of great material wealth or abject poverty, we all face times of feeling very alone. When I was a child my parents told me their stories of childhood that left them feeling vulnerable and abandoned. Both my parents grew up in inner city Philadelphia. My dad was one of 5 children growing up well cared and provided for when suddenly their world changed. My grandfather an engineer disappeared and abandoned his family and immediately their world changed. Suddenly my grandmother was forced into the work force during the depression and all the children were forced to grow up much too fast. No one could really talk about the missing father in the house and when he tried to reappear decades later prior to his death there was no real reunion or reconciliation. That missing place in the family left feelings of abandonment and uncertainty across the hearts and minds of those left behind. A single mother was left to cope alone wondering why and carrying responsibilities meant to be shared and enjoyed together with her husband. The pain lingered and only God knows how everyone coped.
My mother was the youngest of 5 children growing up in a row home in Philadelphia. Times were tough and the only job available to her father (my grandfather) was in a nearby chemical factory notorious for the dangerous fumes emanating from its smoke stacks. People were desperate and there was never a lack of people applying to work there. Everyone knew that the workers there seemed to get sick quite a lot but feeding and providing for the family drove people to overlook the obvious. At age 5 my mom found out that her father was dying from liver cancer and soon he succumbed to the disease. At that tender age the pain of abandonment gripped my mothers soul and haunted her mother with fear and depression. Being the youngest it was difficult to let my mother go when my father proposed to her at age 19. My grandmother had been abandoned once.... and she couldn't bear the thought of being alone again. Years later there was always something deeply emotional as our family observed the prolonged goodbyes of mother and daughter at the end of our family visits with our grandmother. We were not meant to be alone and the fear of abandonment in life is a very deep soul wound.
When my parents married they brought to their marriage an undying commitment to love one another to 'death do us part'. My parents were human and fought and argued at times. There was tension in their humanity and even in their painful pasts. They were impacted by growing up without a father during critical times of development and maturation. There was no question of being able to obtain an education beyond high school. They went to work and raised their children but they were committed to not repeat the horrific pain caused by abandonment. They deeply loved one another and held on through tough times.
The toughest time came in 1990 when at around age 50 my mother was diagnosed with Leukemia. My father and all of us (5 children) were deeply saddened and shocked. I was living in Pensacola when I received the phone call from my mother about her diagnosis. All my childhood I had imagined my mother living a very long life....well into her 80's... my mother would never abandon me. Now at age 31 and preparing for overseas work in Pakistan I felt a knife thrust deep into my soul. I felt a pain enter me that lingered for the next 5 years until my mother's death in 1995. I had to wrestle with the unexpected departure of an amazing mother and the sense of abandonment that was created in all our lives. I wanted my mother healed... I wanted her to live and not die. I found out about her death in a horrible and impersonal way... a fax sent to the hospital I worked at in Gilgit, Pakistan. My mother had died on her birthday....Christmas day, 1995. Her pain was gone forever and as I read the single sheet of fax paper I felt the 'knife' in my back pulled out at last.
Jesus never promised us a pain free existence. He entered our broken world and took upon himself all of our pain.... all of our sin and experienced total abandonment... from his followers and on the cross for a period of time, the darkness of isolation from the eternal Father...crying out "My God, My God, why have your forsaken me?" (See Matthew 27:46, Psalm 22) In a broken and sin marred world, Jesus faced the potential abandonment we all face and carried away the shame and fear that it causes. In Romans chapter 8 we hear of amazing promises of God's forever love staying with us through every trial and adversity. "What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died--more than that, who was raised-- who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger or sword?"
The answer is obvious and rings forth loud and clear in the last verses of Romans chapter 8, "For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."
You're not alone. You're not abandoned. God is near and he's waiting for you to know his deep love and ever present help in times when everyone and everything else has failed you. Let that forever love quench your soul and heal your wounded spirit today.
Jim
