The pedestal I had put my parents on was shattered when they separated. I wrestled with my sense of loyalty, and it was a challenging time for me. When I started college, I went wild with the freedom to start drinking and doing drugs. After all, I had no sense of family and received no guidance from anyone. There were families in college, and they weren’t necessarily all good, but they were families for me all the same. I immersed myself into this life of sin.
After I finished college, I was jobless, friendless, and purposeless, with nothing to look forward to and a great emptiness in my life. What made me recommit was when God told me that He was my father and that I had a family here. Jesus brought up the image of His house and asked me how far away I was from Him – if I was down the block, outside the door, or in the house – and it was then that I knew I had to step back into this home. Christ exposed the entitlement I felt; I had wanted a lavish lifestyle to replace the family He had “taken away” from me. Now I know that God and His family was what I was seeking all along.
God gave me the courage to face my problems instead of trying to run away from them like I used to. I have the reassurance that He loves me and that failure is not something to be feared. By putting Jesus in the center of my life, my perspective on family and love changed. If you asked me to choose between my college years of drinking and having fun or the sixty years of the rest of my life that I have with God, I would choose the sixty years any day.
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