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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

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