Jeremiah 29:14 – Sundry Drives. One Gathering.

14 I will be found by you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back from your captivity; I will gather you from all the nations and from all the places where I have driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you to the place from which I cause you to be carried away captive. Jeremiah 29:14, New King James Version

I got a Facebook message recently from somebody with the unusual name of TJ PJ. She mentioned how much she appreciated everything I posted, drawing specifics from the eclectic mix of history, literature, Reformed theology, and mysticism that often keeps people scrolling.

I am in a season of being purposeful about friendship. In keeping with that, I asked her to be friends on Facebook. I believed we could learn from each other. I believed people who read what I write could benefit from hearing other voices as I got the opportunity to insert them into the thoughts I express here and elsewhere.

She told me she had already tried. Her friend request had been rebuffed, so she was relegated to following me. Nearing my friend limit on Facebook, I had apparently turned her request down. I made assumptions based on how many friends we had in common and frequent and recent experience in which non-Americans, especially, have friended me only to instantly solicit either money or the chance to enlist me in viewing pornography.

I'm blessed that TJ PJ, whose name is actually Paula, persisted. In a week's time, she has been an affirmation of God's work in me. She has been a reminder of the breadth of God's work going on in different places but bringing various tribes and tongues to a mutually adoring understanding of Him.

Before there was Facebook to give us a glimpse of such a gathering heart, there was Jeremiah 29:14. True enough, the people he originally spoke to in that verse were all Jews. Americans like myself and Kenyans like Paula will have to graft ourselves in with Scriptural authority from inspired Paul.

Yet, I find us caught up in the same dynamic of God's heart. How different, even random, must the exiles' experience have seemed? God says He drove them to the nations, and this, in a larger sense, has been the human plight since the Tower of Babel. We are aware of each other's differences, and these echo the distance from God our sins in force.

As conviction strikes individual lives, it is the business of the enemy of our soul to leaden it into condemnation, to convince us we are hopelessly scattered, forsaken, forgotten. We are little pockets here and there of his once faithful. Resistance is futile. We will be assimilated in the places where we have been dropped.

We know, at some level, that punishment is deserved, that fury is warranted. Based on our experience, we associate God's fury in defense of His glory with its human approximation. When man smashes a vase, shall he put it together again? When he experiences the lowest depths of treachery and ruptures a relationship, enforcing distance to protect what is precious to him, will he really undo this edict?

God is not a man, however. He can drive in fearsome ways. He can weigh on our souls with the depth of our sin. He can uproot us from familiar people and circumstances in ways so disorienting that we are sure we must construct whatever facsimile of meaning we can in order to live out our days. But He knows our steps, even those which seem to have been dictated by sin or reaction to it. Those driven to an atomized existence, is likely to be defensive against potential intimacy as to welcome it, we can be gathered.

Those driven to the nations, or even to separate tribes and backgrounds within the same geographical space, those who have tried to find some solace in the superficially alike, we can be gathered into real unity. His love, insists Casting Crowns, is the anthem of nations.

"Christ died to save a great diversity of peoples," insists John Piper in 50 Reasons Jesus Came To Die. All peoples have sinned. Every race and culture needs to be reconciled to God. As the disease of sin is global, so the remedy is global." He is the confidence, sums up Psalm 65:5, of all the ends of the Earth."

As God pledges to bring the exiled of Judah from many places to the PLACE from which He caused them to be carried away captive, so He can do with individual souls. He can unite a Kenyan and an American, a Lebanese and a Laotian, in oneness more meaningful than that which man's governments and languages can manufacture.

Our oneness is in Christ. As the book Heavenly Man will express it, our souls recognize each other. However different our routes have been in His sovereign plans to drive and regather, we come to the place of celebrating similar aspects of His character. We may cherish similar old writers. We may bring one another disparate ways of expressing the same Divine character in which God's Word says there is no shadow of turning.

We ignore, often, a stop action Pentecost going on even now. With noise like a rushing wind, and fire, and thousands changed at the same time, we think we would notice an Acts 2 heart. But we think we must explain Facebook in our prayers, must apologize for the banality there, when, in fact, God can use the same tools to gather His people to adore Him. He is, even in this, preparing His people for the ultimate regathering around His throne.