By Angeline M Duran Santiago
I haven't had the opportunity to write lately, and oh, how I've missed this little space of time to share my heart. I guess we often get moved to write through our emotions, experiences and daily events. Something has happened that has moved my heart and I knew I could only feel better, releasing it down on paper.
What good fellowship we once enjoyed as we walked together to the house of God. NLT Psalm 55:14
This week, many will say, "Good bye" to an old friend. We spent many moments in our yesterdays, our days of strength and youth, breaking night together after service in one another's church would end, we'd begin our "Friday night" and get together and enjoy time together and time in the Lord. I remember it as if were yesterday, everyone together, laughing, reminiscing, and at times sharing our hard times, as youth often do.
As time went on, we enjoyed being part of one another's wedding day, the birth of our children, and even being neighbors. But, that sweet fellowship, that time with one another and with the Lord somehow disappeared in the business of growing up and forming families, taking on jobs, and providing for our families. Somehow, the God we once sought in the midnight hour, seemed far away or not important anymore. Some of us continued to seek him and some did not.
My dear friends, so many of you whom, as my mom shared, would be filled with the Lord as you prayed and you'd dance away, filled by God's Spirit, soon allowed the cares, vanity and ways of this world to pull you away.
Drugs, money, and so many other things became your new god and even your families no longer desired your company.
How did it get so easy to walk away and turn away from our yesterdays? Our moments of soaking in the church alone, or with just a few teens, hungering after God?
How did it become so easy to give up family and our faith?
I am sorry, but as I sit here and write, a part of me is angry. I blame the so called "churches" with their extremely long services, their lists of do and do nots, and their forever singing and never teaching our young people and children that God is more real than the hand in front of their faces.
The pain in my heart loudly accuses the "churches" with their Sunday school that never challenges teens to hunger for God and wait on the Lord because He will show up. We ask families to come to church and sit there for a hundred songs, repeating the same thing over and over, but we never take the time to teach what it means or how to enter into the presence of the Lord through prayer.
We talk about offerings and tithes, but we rarely, if ever, teach our youth that the God in the Bible is still for today, alive, hearing, and powerful to do the same, yesterday, today and until the end of time. We teach our youth to carry their Bibles to get a star on a chart, but they never get a passion to personally open their Bibles at home and have quiet time, alone time with their Savior.
They grow up with a hunger after the world we've advised them to walk away from. They grow up and dive into a world of sin because we didn't take the time to lead them into the fullness of a LIFE in Christ.
Dear Friend,
I don't know what your last moments here in this world were like. While you lived, I tried to be there for you, help you, lead you and find the help you needed. All you ever needed was to allow God's embrace to hold you and all your addictions, all your sadness, all your pain would have been broken. This week, they lay your body in the soil. I pray somehow you cried out once more to the Lord you sang to and danced to in your youth, to the God you played instruments to and prayed to.
Enough is enough. Awaken. No more time to waste. Teach your children and youth to seek after God's heart, or when they get older and difficult times, there will be no foundation, no Word of God stored in them to get through trials, nothing, just emptiness ready to be filled by this world, and who else will be to blame, but you. You, because they sat in your pews week after week and continued to exit empty, with no vision, no passion, no life, nothing.
Remembering yesterday has been hard, but I know it will make me ever more vigilant for my own children to inspire them into loving, knowing, and hungering after God's presence like never before.
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