I was raised Southern Baptist, okay?! I’m not sure why I felt obligated to say that up front or why this topic makes me so tense. I’m a worshiper,  in fact, it was listening to “worship” music that I remembered from more than 20 years prior that was partially responsible for the end of my lengthy prodigal run. God intervened directly in my life — that was unmistakable — but I was left with this question: Which God intervened directly in my life? Bad experiences in Christian church buildings had contributed to my disenchantment with God so I was prejudiced against this God being that God, the Christian God.

I made a CD of some old Christian songs that I remembered, mostly simple choruses and hymns, and noticed that ;my heart would soar listening to them. Now I knew that it was that God after all. I would listen to this music when I was driving alone and often raised my available right hand. This was noteworthy because I was not a hand raiser in my youth.

When I finally worked up the nerve to walk into a church building again, I walked into a building full of hand raisers. I did not want to conform at any level because I still held some bitterness toward Christian congregations, I, of course would not raise my hands. I assumed that anyone who did desperately needed attention and I despised them.

I had a dilemma, I found that raising my hands was a spontaneous expression of worship for me but I did not want to appear to be “one of those”, whatever “those” are. I sought seats at the rear of the congregation so I could raise my hands at will and yet make it clear to everyone else that I did not need attention. This felt disingenuous — I use that word because it sounds much better than “fraud-like” or its dreaded twin “hypocritical”. I’m not sure why I was surprised that holding strong resentment toward Christians in general and hand raisers in particular impeded my worship. It took me months to unravel this truth while I repeatedly tried to reconcile the difference between the spontaneous, unfettered Richard and the uptight, contemptuous one.

Now I raise my hands when I feel it and don’t when I don’t. I most often raise just my right hand, bending it at the elbow over and over in celebratory praise. Of course, if you are new to our local congregation, this appears a great deal like a really big guy angrily shaking his fist at God. I’ll call this “cognitive dissonance” because it sounds more Christian than “frightening the children”.

I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will lift up my hands. \o/

Psalm 63:4

Beauty from Ashes is a study that I wrote and then delivered both online through Tworship Indoors and through my local church this summer. It’s a great blessing when I am given an opportunity to share how God has worked directly in my life and then see it replicated in the lives of others. The greatest blessing is having the tables turned and being blessed in return.

This must be a part of what Jesus meant when he directed us to love our neighbors as ourselves (Matthew 22:39). I had these kinds of experiences with my neighbors at Trinity Evangelical Church in Peterborough, NH and with neighbors from all over the world online. I think of the Holy Spirit as a busy fellow because when He shows Himself so obviously, He shines His light on everyone in the area, not just on the more likely targets.

To everyone who participated in any fashion in the study locally or online, know that you showed me God’s “beauty”, His poetry in your lives; I thank you for that. May God rain down blessings for 1,000 generations on you and yours.

Special thanks to my wife Laurie @mrsmcProdigal for her help delivering Beauty from Ashes locally and to my old friend Marie @spreadingJoy for her assistance online.

Beauty from Ashes Summary:

• It’s about God.
• Everything is connected.
• Everything matters.

Sources:

Romans 8:28

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

Ephesians 2:10

For we are God’s workmanship [poiema: poetry], created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

We searched for these truths in the lives of major Old Testament characters.

• Jacob
• Joseph

Example: How did God show his poetic touch by having the Pharaoh’s cupbearer and baker thrown into the prison Joseph was in?

• Moses
• David

Example: How does God show His poetry by sending Jerusalem’s ne’er-do-wells to join forces with David in his cave?

• Elijah
• Ruth & Naomi
• Esther

Our theme music is below.

Excerpts from The Prodigal Parable

But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him …

The older brother became angry and refused to go in.

“‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ “.  Luke 15:11ff

Scenes from my prodigal journey appropriately set to Prodigal by Casting Crowns:

I’d like to give a special shout out to Blogger and Vlogger Mike Campagna (@aheartforGod) and to Sean @HisFriendlyWay for inspiring this video; Pastor Mike is the master of high impact content videos like this one. Here’s his tweet about this video:

This is the purest expression of my spiritual journey and God’s generosity toward me since Jesus’ prodigal parable (Luke 15:11-32). Like sprinter Derek Redmond, I was well prepared and very good at what I did, then I was crippled, trapped in my own pain and without hope. More …

Read the parable and watch the video linked to the featured photo. It will change your day.

I feel like I cheated, because I was abandoned by my father at about the same age as Donald was when his dad took off. As Donald Miller waxes eloquently in Father Fiction he often reflects ideas that I’ve learned through living in the pain, but then he sometimes gets me right between the eyes with an insight. He’s particularly strong at revealing his “fatherless” thoughts and comparing them to how others act; he openly shares his weaknesses, explaining them but not excusing them.

When he first begins to grasp God as a father through observing a child’s temper tantrum and how a father waits patiently knowing he has a better idea of what is good for his daughter though she writhes on the floor crying out that she is actually the one who is right. How often must God the Father patiently observe us as we throw tantrums about jobs, relationships or circumstance. I don’t know if I can ever be disgruntled again without picturing myself as a child throwing myself on the floor, kicking and screaming while my wise Father patiently waits for me to “get it”.

Kelly Ryan Dolan narrates this book so well that I presumed it was narrated by the author and the author had taken acting and speech lessons. As funny and irreverent in expression as the author is in prose, they’re a perfect match.

I give Father Fiction by Donald Miller 5 out of 5 stars.

Christian Audio provided Father Fiction (audio book) free of charge to me in exchange for writing this review as part of the Christian Audio Reviewers Program.

There’s a long list of things that children do that break the hearts of their parents. The way to shred the heart of a Jesus-loving parent is not, as you might imagine, to reject Jesus, at least not that alone.

I first accepted Jesus’ sacrifice for me when I was 12 in the Southern Baptist church my family attended. I held the new Bible they gave me with my name etched into it. I felt cleansed when I was pulled forth from the water of my baptism. For the next 15 years, God guided me from one mentor to another as I grew in love for Him. I eventually realized in college that my new friends were all Christian through no design of my own. Basketball appeared as the tie that bound us, but God was continuing to walk right alongside me in my journey. I discovered that there was a deeper walk through this group, a walk where spirituality mattered in every moment and every circumstance.

God called me into ministry; I would discover many years later that all of these college friends but one went into ministry as I did. I graduated college and immediately moved onto seminary. I departed for Dallas to attend Dallas Theological Seminary because it was the best seminary in all the land, the home of spiritual giants like Howard Hendricks, Charles Ryrie and Norman Geisler. I moved with no job, no money and no acceptance by the school. I hadn’t even applied yet to a school that must turn away most. God miraculously provided all I needed and my seminary career began.

I was exposed to minds, spirits and journeys that stretched me into understanding I had not known. I dreamed bigger than I ever dreamed. I pulled an index card off the school bulletin board that led me into a youth ministry position at a church plant. The parents loved me as the children embraced my unconventional approaches to …

And then there was none, the lights went dark, and the journey went tragically wrong. The way to shred the heart of a Jesus-loving parent is not to reject Jesus alone, it’s to be the guy described here as suddenly interrupted as the last paragraph. There is life, there is love for God, there is service to God’s people and then there isn’t.

A parent who loves a prodigal child doesn’t just have their God and faith rejected, they have their God and their faith crippled from the inside. They don’t have the luxury of wondering only why their child has chosen a different path, an opposing path, they must also embrace that their child was believing, doing, even leading the spiritual charge and then he wasn’t. A prodigal run hurts much more than the prodigal himself, it sucks the life out of his supporting cast in exact proportion to how much the cast members loves and believes in the prodigal. Who loves and believes more than a mom or a dad?

There are three very important things I want these longsuffering moms and dads to know:

1. God pieced together all of my bad choices over 27 years into an array of help I can offer others as a prodigal returned. I have instant credibility with others who are hurting or making bad choices and hurting others or themselves. I don’t just have a ministry, I have real power in Christ to change lives as the Spirit leads me in a walk alongside prodigals on their journey back into the fold. God regularly delivers broken souls to me for this purpose; in every case so far, the person is struggling with something that I myself had to walk past to see God clearly again.

2. My mom and I are much closer than we have ever been. The last time I saw her we shared and “went Berean” for twelve consecutive hours as we searched for God’s will! This is a mom’s hope, isn’t it, that their relationship to their prodigal child would not just be restored but would be even better (by leaps and bounds).

3. In my absence and partly due to my prodigal run, God developed my mom into a spiritual giant! Moms and dads, do you long for your prodigal to view you this way? I love my mom with no bounds, a love that was perfectly marinated by a wonderfully loving God in 27 years of raging against Him, a love made now perfectly tender and intended to be shared only as exquisitely broken by the hand of a Master.

If you love a prodigal, I advise you to wait and to pray as God leads … but no one said when you see your prodigal in the distance that you can’t sprint faster than you’ve ever run. Your prodigal may return, admire you and be empowered to change lives.

God wins!!!!

I thought this was an appropriate song for this post:

Prodigal by Casting Crowns