Jesus said to Peter,
“…but I have prayed that your own faith may not fail; and once you have turned back, you must strengthen your brothers.”
Luke 22:32 (NAB)
Jesus had total confidence in Peter, even though He knew that he would temporarily lose his way. Jesus told Peter that once he turned back, he should go and strengthen his brethren. With Jesus, it was never “if” he would turn back, but “when.”
Everyone can relate to making wrong choices, losing their way and experiencing failure in some way, but even then, God hopes for us to turn back again, because He has total confidence in us. God’s will is for us to return to Him and then to strengthen others in the faith.
So, instead of dwelling on our past failures, we return to God and with hope, we strengthen others. My two sons had a rebellious period in their early teen years and they both got into trouble with the law. After spending a short time in juvenile detention, they both recommitted their lives to Christ.
Fifteen years later, my son Michael, met and married a beautiful young Christian woman and today their entire family of four serves the Lord. Michael has shared his personal story with the youth group of his church, in order to strengthen the faith and warn young people against the wrong choices that he made.
Michael is just another example like Peter, who Jesus told, “After you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.” We learn from our failures, just as a baby learns to walk, by falling several times. We might even learn some of our greatest lessons from our failures, more than from our successes. We are products of our past, but never prisoners of our past. Like Michael, we can use our past errors to strengthen our brothers and sisters in Christ today.
Learning from our past reminds me of a beautiful true story. There are thousands of orphans in India, and many good people from other nations, who adopt them. It has been said that adopting an orphan means adopting not only the child, but their past as well.
A five year old boy named Saroo was cared for by an older teenage brother named Guddu, in a small village in India, while their mother did hard labor during the day, just to bring home enough food to feed her children.
One day Saroo’s older brother told him to wait on a public bench as he went to find some work to do. Saroo woke up on that bench in the middle of the night and panicked with no one around. He quickly snuck onto a train, which went straight to Calcutta. The lost five year old wandered all over the streets of Calcutta, as many other orphans did, hungry and sleeping on pieces of cardboard in the streets. He longed for his mother and brother.
One day as he stared at a man eating a meal in a restaurant, that man later came out and brought Saroo to a police station, to help him find his home. The problem was that Saroo mispronounced the name of his village so no one knew where he was from. To make a long story short, he was placed in an orphanage and adopted by a very kind Australian couple.
Saroo grew up in a loving home in Australia and finished college, but at the age of 25, he had a restlessness to find his original family in India. He couldn’t help but worry that his mother and brother would have been sick with grief over his disappearance all those years.
He used google earth to search for the town that he thought he was from, but there was no town called Ganestaly. He kept searching until he found a town called, Ganesha Talai, which turned out to be his home town.
Saroo went back to India and after speaking to people in his old neighborhood of Ganesha Talai, he finally found his elderly mother living there. It was a beautiful reunion after 20 years. His mother said she had searched for him for so long, but always believing she would see him again. Saroo sadly learned that his older brother, Guddu, had died, but his reunion with his mother was an example of turning back to strengthen others, though it was in a different way than Peter did.
His Australian adoptive parents were invited to meet his birth mother in India and they were all grateful to have their questions answered. It’s a heartwarming true story of hope, returning and strengthening the hearts of those who lived without answers for so many years.
Lord, if there is anyone that we can strengthen after turning back in some way, show us. Thank you for the power of hope that lives within us and the faith that brings answers to our prayers. Amen
