The first time I really heard the words I was in high school, living regularly anxious over the discordant identities of who I was and who I was quite certain God wanted me to be instead.  The list in my head was long and challenging, and I was so used to falling short that I was growing tired of even trying.  But on this day the hymn struck me as a prayer out of my own inharmonious experience:

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here's my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.

At the time, the thought was comforting in its confirmation that I was not alone.  It was an echo of the apostle Paul’s words and a reminder that I was not the only believer stumbling along the way of Christ:  "I do not understand my own actions.  For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate....I can will what is right, but I cannot do it" (Romans 7:15,18).  In my struggle to live up to the designation of Christ-follower, I could, in good company, admit my condition before God and pray for God's help.  

Yet far more than the assurance that the Christian religion is a religion filled with people who struggle, we are assured by the promise of God in the midst of that struggle, in the midst of weakness and wandering.  In the words of one confession, "[O]ur good God...set out to find humanity, though humanity, trembling all over, was fleeing from God."(1)  At the deepest levels of our humanity, the Christian states that it is true that we are prone to wander, prone to sin, prone to flee from God, but remarkably, that it was in our deepest state of ruin, our deepest plunge into sinfulness, when God stepped forward, unwilling to let us remain in such a state.  The image is beautiful: "God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us."  Long before we could even articulate our lostness, God in his mercy set out to find us, setting forth a plan to make right within us all that is awry.   

In this, the Christian discovers that faith itself, like the accomplishment of Christ on the Cross, is a gift given not out of our own merit, but out of the heart of God.  We are brought to belief by the power of the Spirit and the God who opens our eyes to the work of Christ in the first place.  Thus, even in my struggle to live as I believed a faithful Christian should live was in fact the very promise of God's presence to my troubled teenage mind.  In these feelings of regret that I had wandered, in my deep despair that I had fallen away from God, was the sign of God all along, who never left.  The Holy Spirit was perhaps convicting me to draw nearer and away from whatever had caused me to notice a separation, but in this, God was the one convicting—not my list of rules or the expectations of the church.  My conviction only served as a sign that God had followed where I wandered. 

For the Christian, the recognition that we stray from the God we love is in and of itself a sign of faith and the assurance that God is near.  For faith is a gift, and even doubt, as Lord Tennyson notes, has a "sunnier side."  Whether the Spirit is calling our attention to a faith that could see even more or calling us to remove an obstacle we have placed before the Cross, God is near.  Though we wander and doubt, though we attempt to flee from God's presence or settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even here, God's hand upholds the wanderer.(2)

The story of redemption is the story of a good Father who delights in giving his children good gifts.  In words that continue to encourage wanderers:

O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I'm constrained to be!
Let that grace now like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here's my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.

The Father has indeed not only accepted the seal of Christ, but the Spirit continues to work this good gift within us, accommodating us in our weakness, calling us further into the life of the kingdom of God. 

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.