Article February 8, 1999 Issue

Healing the lonesome heart

How to feel loved and cherished

By Channing Walker

A wordless scene unreels in the final minutes of the film classic Tender Mercies, leaving on many viewers a healing imprint made all the more indelible by the scene's very quietness. The sequence is simple enough. Two people, a man and a boy, pass a football back and forth in an open field. Through the course of the film, viewers have come to know the man as a onetime country singing star who fell on hard times, lost his only child from a previous marriage, and climbed back to modest stability in a new marriage. The boy, newly the stepson of the man, never knew his father, who had not returned from Vietnam. As the camera follows the football back and forth, an awareness settles over viewers. The fatherless child now has a dad. The childless father now has a son. The husbandless widow now has a mate. God's tender mercies, to draw a phrase from the Psalmist, have been ministered yet again.

There is not a psalm in every film. Perhaps there is one in every heart. If we could see clearly enough, we might discern the working in each heart of God's tender mercies—that quality of the Almighty which gently succors each of us, leading us to a place of warmth, wholeness, and included-ness. In the divine scheme of things, being cherished is in store for all. At heart, we are here as the representative of divine Love—here to pour love out on others. At heart, we're here as the object of Love—here where love from God is poured out on us. These are reasons we come together.

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There is no alone
February 8, 1999
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