Will your prodigal come home?
Sherri and Steve heard their son frantically gasping for air before they saw him. Craig’s laboured rasping greeted them as they stepped into their house. They had headed home from their church with that warm glow of accomplishment and gratitude that worship leaders feel following a “good” Sunday morning service. Craig lay sprawled on the couch, his puffy face a pallid grey save for the alarming rash on his cheek. Clawing at a cushion, he fought desperately for breath. His immune system was shutting down fast, short-circuited by last night’s lethal cocktail of crystal methadone and crack cocaine. His eyes were wide with fear and brimming with tears.
Paralysed, Sherri and Steve stared at their darling son as he writhed in pain before them. After a stunned moment, they began trying to save his life. Sherri grabbed the phone and called for medical help; Steve tried to keep hold of Craig’s clammy hand as he thrashed around, as if by holding him he could save him from plunging into the abyss.
This was yet another painful junction on the long road that they had trekked for four years. As a child, Craig had always been enthusiastic about God and the church. Inheriting his parents’ love of music, he had joined the worship team. Then, overnight, or so it seemed to his parents, everything changed.
To Sherri and Steve, it appeared that a dark, Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation was overtaking their son, an evil takeover bid that they were powerless to prevent. No trauma that they knew of signalled Craig’s decision to so dramatically change his life. His first experience of drugs was like a dark conversion, sudden and cataclysmic. It was the beginning of the family’s nightmare.
Craig would often return home in the middle of the night stupefied into a drug- and alcohol-fuelled delirium, swearing loudly and screaming at his sisters. And then there were the nights—and the weeks—when he didn’t come home at all and didn’t phone. Sleepless, Sherri and Steve would stare through the gloom at their bedroom ceiling and wonder if their son was alive or dead. As they lay there, the sound of every passing car would birth hope and then, when it was not him, shroud them with disappointment. The scraping of his key in the door would give momentary joy and relief, which was then dashed when they saw the terrible state he was in. They would have to undress him and put him in bed, just as when he was a child. But now he was spattered with his own vomit and interspersed terrible obscenities with tender, apologetic words, and then whimpered curses again as he drifted in and out of delirium. Finally, he would sleep, sometimes for fifteen hours. The next day, they would hear him in the shower, and then, without so much as a goodbye, the door of their home would slam behind him once more. Sherri would hurry into his bedroom and place her hand on the still-warm bed sheet.
Sherri and Steve’s experience was extreme. A prodigal—a catch all term for someone who walks away from intimacy with God—obviously doesn’t always become a drug or alcohol abuser, or a blurry eyed player on the party circuit. There are plenty of prodigals who drift into godless respectability, and still others who are prodigals in the pew, whose hearts have slowly, quietly, gone cold, but whose bodies are still in the building. But however prodigality is expressed, probably every Christian knows and grieves for someone whose life choices make a bleak declaration: the good news of the gospel has not been good enough for them.
When we discover that someone we love is tramping the warpath against God, we are left feeling desolate, sometimes hopeless, and very, very alone.
Prodigals, and those who love them, are people, not statistics. They are people greatly loved by God. In Francis Ford Coppola’s movie The Conversation, a couple pass by a homeless man sleeping on a park bench, and the woman ponders the prone, unmoving man and sees more than a pile of rags. “He was once somebody’s baby boy,” she says, a poignant reminder that no-one is a mere statistic. And those who grieve for prodigals need to huddle together for some warmth. A special, excruciating pain is reserved for parents who love prodigals.
Cruel School
They called it the tribulation, and it was a particularly fiendish form of execution used by the Ancient Greeks. Death came by gradual, never-ending crushing. A huge rock was placed upon the chest of a condemned prisoner and they would be left alone, helpless and hopeless. Over a period of days, the weight would literally crush the life out of them, snapping the bones and finally compressing the chest cavity, until their thousands of small breaths mercifully stopped. The poetic King James Version uses the word tribulation to describe the pressure that followers of Jesus often experience. Those whose hearts have been broken by prodigals begin each day with the realisation of a rock still upon their chest. For parents who have prodigals who are living a wild, far country lifestyle, ordinary daily happenings become fearsome ogres. A phone ringing in the middle of the night is never a welcome sound for anyone, but the parent of a prodigal can be instantly transported. In that heart-stopping moment of blinking awake, you stare at the glowing LED of your alarm clock, 3:12a.m., and fumble for the phone. In that second, you—in your mind’s eye, at least—are standing before a coffin that holds the broken body of your child. Or you find yourself on a remote road next to a wrecked, bloodied car, bathed in the flashing lights of an ambulance. You develop a stunning ability to imagine the worst. You sweat and sometimes tremble as your mind, like a mad computer out of control, skips through any number of horrifying fates that might befall your prodigal.
You cry easily and without warning. A movie about happy family life at first warms your heart, then taunts you; tears flow as onscreen laughter and hugs are shared. And being around real-life, happy households make you feel your own failures more acutely. Their well-being heightens your sense of wretchedness.
That’s why we need to pause and think before we slap a huge label marked “prodigal” on someone. Everyone is unique; their story different. The parable of the prodigal son was told in the first place partly as a response to indiscriminate labelling. The religious experts of the day habitually scrawled the word “sinner” over certain people they didn’t approve of—and then wrote them off as being beyond the love of God. Jesus objected to their hasty categorising and so told the beautiful story. Ironically, we can misuse that very same parable and make a new labelling machine of our own.
Jesus never used the word “prodigal” at all—it’s not in the biblical text, but appears in the paragraph break in most Bibles because “the parable of the prodigal son” is the name by which this story has become commonly known. But never once in his telling of the story does Jesus tag the wayward boy in this way—at home, in the far country, and as guest of honour at the homecoming party, he is always faithfully described the same way: as the younger son. When we use the term “prodigals”, we must do so for purposes of shorthand only, as a broad term to describe someone who is evidently or apparently away from God. But it must remain shorthand and never develop into a label, for such labelling could actually provoke people to walk from God.
Some people might well be running—but some of them are out there on those lonely hills looking for God, not trying to evade him. Perhaps it’s startling, and maybe it’s a relief, but consider this: some of our so-called prodigals are not prodigals at all. Before we pray for them to come home, let’s make sure they really have left. Are they prodigals or restless exiles, some of them so desperate for truth that they have fled the comfortable warmth of the pew to try to find it? When it comes to the prodigal story, we have a sad tendency to confuse the father and his house with the institution called the church. And when we do that, we wrongly assume that those who are lost from church have also abandoned God. Some so-called prodigals don’t warrant that name.
Others are indeed on the run – and terribly angry with it. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, famous for his declaration, “God is dead,” was a prodigal. A theology and philology student at the University of Bonn, he was a minister’s son; both his grandfathers were Lutheran ministers. His paternal grandfather, Friedrich August Ludwig Nietzsche, was a distinguished scholar; ironically, one of his books affirmed the "everlasting survival of Christianity.” Nietzsche, appalled at the idea of a single, ultimate, judgmental authority who is “privy to everyone's hidden, and personally embarrassing, secrets,” apparently longed to see the destruction of his grandfather’s faith. One of his characters spews hatred towards an all-knowing God. “He saw with eyes that saw everything...all my concealed disgrace and ugliness....He crawled into my dirtiest nooks. This most curious one had to die.”
Reasons for hope
Whatever the reason for the prodigals going, we can be sure that God longs for them to come home to him. He’s always had problems with his children. God sobs through his weeping prophet Hosea: “It was I who taught them to walk, taking them by the arms; but they did not realise it was I who healed them’ (Hosea 11:3) And this has not been a one-off calamity. Throughout history, God has been the cruelly spurned parent.
God the parent longs and looks for prodigals. When we have no idea where they are, God knows, and is out there, on their heels, ‘the Hound of Heaven’, as Francis Thompson calls him. Tom Bisset reminds us, “There is no escape from the God who is everywhere. He is there and He is ceaselessly calling His own back to the Father’s house.”1
And God will use others to bring prodigals home – we must know that it’s not all about our prayers, our words, our actions. The searching God is the master of choreography, who is so able to connect our prodigals with people who can be a lifeline to them. We’ve all probably experienced those “coincidental” meetings and moments that we call “serendipity.” Steve and Sherri learned that an old friend of Craig’s had shown up at a party and announced that he was now a Christian—a “chance” meeting that was to have a significant impact upon Craig.
We need to find hope afresh as we let go of guilt that does not belong to us. When a prodigal heads for the bright lights, those left behind are prone to torment themselves with the question, did we make mistakes? That question can be absolutely resolved right here, right now: we all have. There is no such thing as the perfect parent outside of heaven.
Home is?
If we are to hope and pray for a homecoming, surely we must take time to consider what and where “home” actually is, lest we misdirect our prayers and our hopes, or jump too hasty and inappropriate conclusions. When we want something as desperately as a change of life for prodigals, we can subconsciously develop fixed ideas about what that change will look like, which could be disappointing for us, and far more importantly, devastating for a prodigal trying to find his or her way home to God.
We are in danger of hastily thinking that home is where we are, not only physically, but home is our convictions, choice of church, priorities, specific standards of holiness, work ethics, social habits, waking and sleeping patterns, and even politics. Home can symbolise the career hopes that we might quietly nurse, especially for prodigal children, or even some parental aspirations that they might one day be involved in full-time Christian leadership. We human beings have an insatiable desire to make people look and act like us. The homecoming of a prodigal will actually require those that love them the most to go on a new journey to a fresh, uncharted territory in their relationship. We must resist the strong temptation to demand that prodigals return to where they once were, or the greater urge to call them to where we are, even though that place seems quite wonderful to us. Bravery will be needed, because we must be prepared to go with the prodigals to a place that is new to both of us, to an unfamiliar landscape that neither of us have ever encountered before.
The very best that we can do is to release those we love to be all and only what God calls them to be. Thomas Merton says it well: ‘The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them’.
That release prevents prayer becoming a kind of voodoo charm. We pray, perhaps even backing up our pleading with fasting, and look for a swift, satisfying result. But then there is nothing. We spy no welcome sight of a returning prodigal on the horizon, and so the answer hasn’t come, at least in our estimation. God must be deaf to our cries, blind to our tears, unable or unwilling to act at our desperate bidding. We are angry. And we are quite wrong.
Prayer is not a kind of control mechanism, magic in Jesus’ name. We are calling for change in someone who has their own willpower, their own choices to make, and our praying doesn’t override or cancel that reality out. Our prayers call for kind, loving influences to surround our prodigals—but they have the choice to welcome or shun those influences.
If you love a prodigal, you are not alone. However much you love them, God loves them more. While you wait for homecoming, may quiet hope warm your heart. In the beautiful parable, the wayward son seemed too far gone, one destined to live and die in the far country. But there came a day when he headed home, a day when the band struck up a merry tune again, the barbecue blazed, and a welcome party kicked in. May such a day come soon for you and yours.
1) Why Christian Kids Leave the Faith, Tom Bisset, Discovery House, Grand Rapids, 1992, p. 206