God Hungers For Us
This week, Navigator staff from across Ontario gathered in our fair city of Waterloo to share ministry stories and touch base as far as the future direction of the Navigators of Canada ministry. During that time, my co-worker Jeremy Horne shared a wonderful devotional story with us.
Jeremy suggested that as much as people often hunger for God or some sense of the divine, God also hungers for us. God hungers to live in relationship with us as His children. This is encapsulated in Jesus' story of the prodigal son where the Father runs both outside and towards his Son to welcome him home (Luke 15:11-32).
In order to create some kind of sense as far as how much God hungers for us, Jeremy told us a story about a father whose daughter became a prostitute in Toronto. In the past, this father and daughter had many arguments and needless to say, the father did not approve of his daughter's choice of profession. However; despite any reasoning, the daughter decided to never see her father again and left her family to live this life in downtown Toronto.
One night, the father drove to the house where his daughter provided sexual services for men and parked outside of that house. As strange men went in and out of the house, the father waited and waited for his daughter to come out so that he could embrace her and tell her that he loved her. Night after night, the father would drive out to the house, park outside, and wait for his daughter until she finally came out. I'm not sure how the story ended or if the father and daughter ever made reparations; but Jeremy suggested that this could be an analogy for how much God hungers for us.
God loves us and hungers for us so much that he waits constantly, patiently, and without end for us to come outside of the houses of security that we've built for ourselves and relate with Him; to know His love.
As the father of a one-year-old daughter, obviously this story has a special context for me. Nevertheless, if this analogy comes even close to describing how much God wants to live in relationship with me, I want some of that!
