Living and leaving the prodigal life
Growing up in southern California, I eagerly anticipated our annual family trek to my grandparents’ dairy farm nestled in the rolling Ozark foothills. To a kid from Los Angeles, it was a magical place—eighty acres of woods, paths, ponds and pastures, just waiting to be explored and all accessible without venturing to the nearest botanical garden. A screened porch lined the back of the four-room farmhouse. On the back porch sat an old couch on which we spent many an evening curled up listening to Grandpa’s soft bass voice rise above the chorus of tree frogs, crickets and cicadas as he shared with us stories from his favorite book—the Bible. An old wringer washer stood in the corner draped by a quilt, waiting for Saturday when Granny would heat water drawn from the cistern and give the week’s laundry a good sudsing. The back porch doubled as a shed for items too good to store in the barn but not quite good enough to earn a place in the house. The porch was also home to the slop bucket.The slop bucket contained the discarded waste of the day. Since my grandparents were frugal, having survived the depression era, Granny could think up a use for nearly every leftover scrap, so only the totally useless bits and pieces found their way into the slop bucket. It usually held such items as cornhusks, strawberry caps, pea hulls, and untouched morsels scraped from the plates of children whose eyes were bigger than their bellies. No matter how much my stomach growled after a long day of fishing, catching June bugs, picking blackberries, or skipping rocks on the pond, I never remember being hungry enough to ask Granny for a snack from the slop bucket.
While physical hunger has never been an issue in my life, spiritual hunger has. My father was a deacon in the church and later become a Gospel preacher, yet I nearly starved to death spiritually. This may seem odd for someone who came from a long line of Christians, but as I reach out to others, I’ve found that many Christians sit in their pews each week suffering from silent pangs of spiritual starvation. I’ve discovered the reason for this: God has no grandchildren. The faith of our parents will sustain us for only so long, then we must develop a personal relationship with God. Since I’m stubborn and self-willed, I learned this the hard way.
I’ve always been a bit of a maverick, kind of like the young man Jesus talked about in Luke 15. This young man approached his father and requested his portion of the inheritance. Although some Jewish fathers chose to divide their property while they were still alive and “retire,” this action was initiated by the father, not the heirs, and most certainly not from the youngest son. By prematurely asking for his share, the younger son may as well have said, “Father, I wish you were already dead so I could receive my portion of your wealth right now!” This action showed the son’s arrogance and total disregard for his father. I displayed a similar attitude the day I told my parents not to contact me or try to locate me—that I would call them when I was ready. I had already begun my descent into darkness when I made that statement, but the fall escalated when I left home.
Psalm 1 describes how sin gradually creeps into our lives. “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly” (Psalm 1:1a). When we walk with the ungodly, we may deceive ourselves by thinking, “I’m not really hanging out with these people. We just happen to be going the same way, so I’ll walk with them.” As we continue our stroll with sinners, the teachings of Christ steadily slip away. The first thing to go in my spiritual life was prayer. Prayer had been so important to my family when I was growing up, but I was never very good at it. I remember circling the chairs each evening at my grandparents’ home and singing a hymn before kneeling down and joining together in a family prayer. When it was my turn to contribute, I usually muttered something I’d heard someone else say before that I thought had sounded good. And when I prayed by myself at bedtime, I usually fell asleep before finishing. I knew that wasn’t very respectful to God, so I eventually stopped.
The psalmist continues by adding “Nor stands in the path of sinners” (Psalm 1:1b). At first we were just walking along with the ungodly. Now we’ve actually stopped to visit. Meanwhile, spiritual hunger sets in as we detach from our Christian roots. Bible study was the next thing I abandoned. Oh, I’d follow along during sermons and usually read my lesson for Sunday school, but I could have left my Bible on the church pew, because I never referred to it at home.
I had always enjoyed going to church, and I continued attending worship services for many months even after drifting into a sin-filled life. Perhaps I felt Sunday morning attendance would somehow erase the previous week’s sins. After a while, it became difficult to sit through a sermon, so I quit going. I had reached the final stage warned about in Psalm 1—sitting in the seat of the scornful. “Nor sits in the seat of the scornful” (Psalm 1:1c). After walking together and stopping to chat, I had now pulled up a chair and become part of the group.
The next three years were spent separated from the church, separated from my family, and separated from my God. I sank deeper into the mire of alcohol, promiscuity, gambling, smoking, and cursing. Yet I still believed I was in control. I had never succumbed to the temptation of illegal drugs; therefore I believed everything was just fine. I thank God for the blessing of being an active duty Marine at the time, because I’m certain that only the fear of routine drug testing saved me from the horrors of drug addiction.
I began suffering from tremendous headaches, as though an ever-tightening vice clamped the back of my head. A trip to the doctor resulted in a prescription for a strong narcotic. I had reached the point of barely being able to function. When taking the pills, I’d sleep for ten hours at a stretch. Without them came the excruciating headaches, which were diagnosed as tension related. The doctor suggested that I learn how to relax. I realized the tension originated from going against my innate values. Wracked with guilt, I decided to take my own life. If I were to be condemned to hell anyway, why not just get there now and get it over with?
I never heard the door open, yet my roommate walked in to find me crouched on the floor, the contents of several desk drawers strewn about me. I raked through the rubble with my left hand. In my right hand, I held a gun. When she asked what I was doing, I turned my tear-streaked face to meet her stare. “I’m going to kill myself,” I replied, “but I can’t find the bullets.” Instead of a panicked lunge to wrestle the gun from my grasp, she spoke with quiet words that I believe God himself put into her mouth, “Let me help. I’ll hold the gun so you can dig with both hands.” I tossed the weapon aside and resumed my search. She immediately unloaded the gun.
I soon found myself confined to the third floor of a hospital with “Suicidal Ideation” stamped on my chart. Nothing had gone the way I planned. Ruled by despair, remorse and anger, my life had become a classic rendition of the cliché “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” How does one raised in a loving Christian home find herself in such a situation? How could a bright, popular Christian plummet to such depths? Desperate. Overwhelmed. Isolated. Trapped. I had hit bottom.
The young man in Luke 15 probably felt the same way. After wasting his inheritance on sinful living, he wound up in a foreign land feeding pigs. The Law of Moses forbade the Jews from eating or sacrificing pigs, so most Jews refused to touch or even go near them in order to prevent themselves from becoming defiled. Yet this man was hungry enough to crave a meal from the slop bucket! That was about as low as a Jew could find himself.
You may be thinking the same thing about your life. Let me assure you that there is hope. You can climb out of whatever pit you’re in. You are capable. No matter what you may have done, you are forgivable. Despite the feelings of self-hate bearing down on you, you are loveable. And no matter how worthless you may consider yourself, you are valuable, even though you may not feel that way right now. I know I didn’t. And the prodigal son didn’t either. The Bible tells us that he felt that he was no longer worthy to be called his father’s son.
The purpose of this book is to let you know it is okay to go back home. You are God’s child. The steps of the journey will be difficult, but God will guide you. When I was dismissed from the hospital and made the U-turn homeward, I reached the most difficult point in my life—facing the destruction I had left behind and would have to trudge through on my return trip. I was full of doubt. How could God forgive me after everything that I had done? I was full of fear. How could I ever become the person God had created me to be? I was full of self-hate. If I hated myself, how could God still love me? It was at that point that my father then gave me the words which sustained me throughout my journey, “Never put limitations on God’s grace. Never underestimate the power of His love.” This is the message I wish to share with you.
At a recent lecture, a mother who had lost a prodigal child asked me why I journeyed into a life of sin. To the family of a prodigal, knowing the answer to that question runs alongside that of discovering a cure for cancer. No one knows exactly why one leaves, sometimes not even the prodigal. We have become a nation of finger-pointers, blaming everyone from gun and cigarette manufacturers to restaurants. When something is amiss, we want to know whose fault it is. And when a prodigal goes astray, many begin to ask questions. “Where did I go wrong?” “Is it my fault?” “What could I have done differently?”
For me, leaving followed a series of poor choices I made, each one escalating my situation more and more out of control until I reached the point of total helplessness. If you had asked me at the time, I would have blamed everyone but myself. But in retrospect, I can see many times I passed up chances to grasp a hand that was stretched out to help me. As you begin trudging your way home, listen closely for the gentle rap of opportunity on the door of your heart. Sometimes it only knocks once.
Remember that slop bucket on the back porch? It was my grandfather’s unpleasant chore to carry it away from the house, dump its contents, and rinse the bucket each evening after supper. If he had let the bucket sit even one night, the stench would have probably been sickening. Life is like that. Jesus said, “Sufficient for the day is its own trouble” (Matthew 6:34). This journey is to be taken one day at a time. Each day, every day, we must empty our slop bucket and rinse out the troubles of that day so that we can begin the next morning with a fresh start.
Maybe you’ve never been in a suicidal drunken stupor or longed for a sip from the slop bucket and you’re wondering if this book is for you. Imagine we’re all on the elevator of life. Some push the up button; others go down. Those descending will all exit the elevator on different levels—some lower than others. I once heard a teenage girl give an inspirational talk to women in recovery. She related her life of drug use, prostitution and armed robbery, which had landed her in jail. As I listened I kept thinking, “But I’ve never done all that! Why am I here?” She must have read my mind, because she concluded her speech by saying, “You probably haven’t done all the awful things I’ve done, but if you don’t change your lives now—you will. I’m telling you what it was like so you can make that change. I did all this so you don’t have to!” You don’t have to go all the way to the basement! Stop the elevator now and push the up button! This book will show you how.
