Nehemiah 1:9 · World English Bible
but if you return to me, and keep my commandments and do them, though your outcasts were in the uttermost part of the heavens, yet I will gather them from there, and will bring them to the place that I have chosen, to cause my name to dwell there.’
Coming back is the only condition, and the promise is that no distance is too far to be crossed. The disease here is despair dressed up as realism, the belief that some failure has finally put a person out of reach.
From the Sufism reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
SUFISM
Coming back is the only condition, and the promise is that no distance is too far to be crossed. The disease here is despair dressed up as realism, the belief that some failure has finally put a person out of reach.
The cure is simply to return, to keep what was asked and to mean it. Wherever the scattered self has drifted, even to the edge of the sky, the promise is to gather it home. The One who chose a dwelling for His name is already reaching toward whoever turns, closing the gap from His own side.
Sufism lens
What have you decided is too far gone to come back from, and who told you that?
The mind wanders off and is brought back to the breath, and the bringing back is not a punishment, it is the whole practice. Straying a thousand times and returning a thousand times is the practice itself.
All things return to the root, and in that returning there is stillness. However long the drifting out, the way home is a turn rather than a distance.
The rabbis taught that turning back is open until the last breath, and that the gates stand open even for someone who thinks they slammed them shut. The distance a person imagines is always greater than the distance that is actually there.
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Sufism