Still Small Voice

"It's time to come back home", that's what I heard as my head pounded and my body lie aching all over.  After twelve hours of drinking I could have easily have excused it as a figment of my imagination, but I was stone cold sober.  The voice spoke again, the voice didn't gust like a wind, or rumble like an earthquake, or even burn like a fire.  It was still quite voice.  To this day I'm not even sure that it was audible, but I heard it and more importantly I felt it, and I instantly knew who it was.

Since I was a baby I was in church.  I expected the Lord Jesus Christ as my savior back in second grade.  Still life had pulled me along way from saying that prayer under the covers of that top bunk with my dad so many years ago.  Disagreements with Sunday school teachers, the pull of friends and acceptance had me at odds with I knew I believed.  So far from a time when I felt a calling to preach there I lay, with the mother of  all hanger overs, yet I had the sound mind to process what was going on.  I think they call it "a moment of clarity", but I saw the past six years flash before my eyes.  Just like the prodigal son I was taking a long hard look at error of my sinful ways.

I wasn't happy with what I saw.  Leaving the church lead to drinking, while drinking led to a toxic relationship in which I was married because I fathered a child out of wedlock only to see my son die twenty minutes after birth and the marriage end in divorce almost exactly one year later.  I was depressed, lost and broken.  I no longer loved myself and I wondered how any one could love a wretch like me, but still I heard the voice say again, "It's time to come back home."  So there on the spot I prayed the prayer many drunks before and after me have prayed, "Lord if you make this feeling go away I will change", only this time I meant it.

I didn't know how I was going to change, but I knew if the Lord cared enough to reach down for me in the state I was in he would help me find away to change as well.  I knew one thing I had to do was get over my personal hang ups about "organized religon" and atleast attend a church service.  Which I did one week to that day, and while I thought I may start having to attend a meeting once a week to keep up my end of the bargin with the All Mighty, I ended up on a journey that would take me around the world to learn about how He loves me, and then in turn spread that love.