Take the train to the boulevard
My love will follow you
My love will follow you
There are a lot of people who have been left behind. Imagine a mother who leaves her four young children behind in a hotel room, who just leaves town and doesn't say goodbye. I know of one.
You can try to lose yourself downtown
You can burn all your bridges down
My love will follow you
My love will follow you
I know one child who moved clear across the continent, to a city of strangers. He doesn't call his family. He's cut off communication. I saw him once in diner off the PCH in Santa Monica, and he looked lost, tattooed and pierced, trying to lose himself among the crowd.
My love will follow you
Down every highway of your soul
You can leave me far behind
But my love will be a shadow
Everywhere you go
If you should go so far
That you cannot get back
You may not remember
But my heart will not lose track
My love will follow you
My love will follow you
Beneath the veneer of civility, busyness, and provision,in the subterranean soul, I suspect many people are more lost than they know. Sometimes as I prepare for lawsuits, as I drill down deep into the lives of strangers, assembling a picture of their private lives and public face, I am awed by what I have to do, a kind of holy awe that I am peering into the life of another person in a way that even a close friend would not, in a way that only God should, maybe, and it doesn't seem right, even if it is necessary. In their credit card and bank statements I see a picture of their hopes and dreams and desperation. It's not all black and white down here. I see a picture of lostness. I see people who behave like orphans, who live like all they have is themselves.
But for a God of relentless love, it would be easy to lose heart.
I first heard this song, "My Love Will Follow You," when Richard Shindell sung it in a small bar in Memphis. He told us he went to seminary and dropped out. He's into Ba' Hai. It struck me then that he was singing it for himself, that he was a little lost himself and that the song was an expression of his hope. He didn't write it. Julie Miller wrote it. It's absolutely true.
No matter where we go, no matter what bridges we think we burned, no matter if we think we can't get back, God is there. He pursues us, shadows us, like the song says "down every highway of our soul." In fact, if, as Scripture says, "God is love," then He can't help himself. He can't not love us. He'll follow us as long as it takes.
J.I. Packer says that when Paul says "the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given unto us," the words literally mean poured or dumped out on us. It's inexhaustible. Like a flood. Imagine that kind of love.
If I had only one prayer I could pray, I think I would pray that I would fully know the love of God for me and for the world. It seems to me that if I really knew that, then everything else would fall in place, every other prayer subsumed in that.
And if that mother knew that, she'd come home. And if that wayward son felt that, he'd go home. And all those inhabitants of my files that lie, steal, and cheat, who've turned their backs on Love --- well if they knew that love, then they'd come Home too. They'd have to. They couldn't help themselves.
