Ye Who Are Weary Come Home
by Marsha Boyd-Mitchell
“Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.” Proverbs 22:6, NIV
When I was 15, my parents took my grandmother on a trip from New Brunswick to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. My grandmother’s baby sister had been diagnosed with cancer, and Gram really wanted to visit and check on her. It was two days of driving, and we arrived after supper on the second day. We were greeted at the door and my great-uncle showed us to the living room to visit. My grandmother stayed at the house, sleeping in the guest bedroom, and my parents and I stayed at a local hotel.
This visit was the first time that I remember meeting this lady. I had not heard too many good things about her as a person. She had led a rough life, running away from home and leaving behind a nice family to grieve her actions. My grandmother was always heartsick for her youngest sister’s choices. During that first evening, this new-to-me great-aunt wanted to talk about her illness and about a troubling, reoccurring dream. In her dream, she would see her childhood home and her late mother standing in the driveway, beckoning her toward the house. In the dream, her mother was dressed all in white. My great-aunt always woke up before she ever made it home. I still remember her desperation in conveying the events.
My 15-year-old self said, “Maybe your childhood home represents heaven.” Everyone in the room stopped talking and listened intently to a conversation that spanned the generations. I am sure I was not all that eloquent, but I remember God giving me the courage to just speak the gospel the way I had heard it explained so many times. God is not willing that any should perish, and the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world. Could it be that God in his mercy was leading her home? Thirty years have since passed, and I’ll never know what exactly my great-aunt’s dreams were all about. I wonder now about the prayers of my great grandmother for a prodigal daughter. Were her prayers guiding my great aunt home in those dreams?
How far-reaching are our prayers? Even in the most impossible situations—rebellion, stubbornness, and unbelief—the prayers for our souls follow us. If this is true, how important are the prayers you and I pray in earnest for the youth in our sphere of influence? How valuable are times spent teaching them the Word of God?
While I was thinking this over this week, one of my neighbours, a senior lady with a strong Christian faith, testified about one of her brothers going to church over the Easter weekend. He hadn’t been to church for a long, long time. She said, “Marsha, all those prayers from our mother and father are following our family now. When you train a child up to know the truth, they come back to it, even though sometimes it is in old age.” I smiled, thinking how good and how gracious is our God.
I also thought about my greataunt who, before cancer took her, accepted that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life and no one comes to the Father except through him (see John 14:6). The Lord extended his hand across the generations to lead another lost soul home. “And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not” (Galatians 6:9, KJV). When praying for your kids, grandkids, great-grandkids, and those you hold dear, remember the words of Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission: “It is possible to move men, through God, by prayer alone.”
~ Dr. Marsha Boyd-Mitchell
Executive Director Christian Action Federation of NB Inc
Principal, Sussex Christian School
