I wanted to start by sharing with you all, a story.
“A young girl grows up on a cherry orchard just above Traverse City, Michigan. Her parents, a bit old-fashioned, tend to overreact to her nose ring, the music she listens to, and the length of her skirts. They ground her a few times, and she seethes inside. “I hate you!” She screams at her father when he knocks on the door of her room after an argument, and that night she acts on a plan she has mentally rehearsed scores of times. She runs away.
She has visited Detroit only once before, on a bus trip with her church youth group to watch the Tigers play. Because newspapers in Traverse City report in lurid details the gangs, the drugs, and the violence in downtown Detroit, she concludes that is probably the last place her parents will look for her. California, maybe, or Florida, but not Detroit.
Her second day there she meets a man who drives the biggest car she’s ever seen. He offers her a ride, buys her lunch, and arranges a place for her to stay. He gives her some pills that make her feel better than she’s ever felt before. She was right all along, she decides: her parents were keeping her from all the fun.
The good life continues for a month, two months, a year. The man with the big car – she calls him “Boss” – teaches her a few things that men like. Since she’s underage, men pay a premium for her. She lives in a penthouse, and orders room service whenever she wants. Occasionally she thinks about the folks back home, but their lives now seem so boring and provincial that she can hardly believe she grew up there.
She has a brief scare when she sees her picture printed on a flier with the headline, “Have you seen this child?” But by now she has blond hair, and with all the makeup and body-piercing jewelry she wears, nobody would mistake her for a child. Besides, most of her friends are runaways, and nobody squeals in Detroit.
After a year the first sallow signs of illness appear, and it amazes her how fast the boss turns mean. And before she knows it she’s out on the street without a penny to her name. She still turns a couple of tricks a night, but they don’t pay much, and all the money goes to support her habit. When winter blows in she finds herself sleeping on metal grates outside the big department stores. “Sleeping” is the wrong word – a teenage girl at night in downtown Detroit can never relax her guard. Dark bands circle her eyes. Her cough worsens.
One night as she lies awake listening for footsteps, all of a sudden everything about her life looks different. She no longer feels like a woman of the world. She feels like a little girl, lost in a cold and frightening city. She begins to whimper. Her pockets are empty and she’s hungry. She needs a fix. She pulls her legs tight underneath her and shivers under the newspapers she’s piled atop her coat. Something jolts a synapse of memory and a single image fills her mind: of May in Traverse City, when a million cherry trees bloom at once, with her golden retriever dashing through the rows and rows of blossomy trees in chase of a tennis ball.
“God, why did I leave,” she says to herself, and pain stabs at her heart. “My dog back home eats better than I do now.” She’s sobbing, and she knows in a flash that more than anything else in the world she wants to go home.
Three straight phone calls – three straight connections to voicemail. She hangs up without leaving a message the first two times, but the third time she says, “Dad, Mom, it’s me. I was wondering about maybe coming home. I’m catching a bus up your way, and it’ll get there about midnight tomorrow. If you’re not there, well, I guess I’ll just stay on the bus until it hits Canada.”
It takes about seven hours for a bus to make all the stops between Detroit and Traverse City, and during that time she realizes the flaws in her plan. What if her parents are out of town and miss the message? Shouldn’t she have waited another day or so until she could talk to them? And even if they are home, they probably wrote her off as dead long ago. She should have given them some time to overcome the shock.
Her thoughts bounce back and forth between those worries and the speech she is preparing for her father: “Dad, I’m sorry. I know I was wrong. It’s not your fault; it’s all mine. Dad, can you forgive me?” She says the words over and over, her throat tightening even as she rehearses them. She hasn’t apologized to anyone in years.
The bus has been driving with lights on since Bay City. Tiny snow flakes hit the pavement rubbed worn by thousands of tires, and the asphalt steams. She’s forgotten how dark it gets at night out here. A deer darts across the road and the bus swerves. Every so often, a billboard. A sign posting the mileage to Traverse City. “Oh God.”
When the bus finally rolls into the station, its air brakes hissing in protest, the driver announces in a crackly voice over the microphone, “Fifteen minutes, folks. That’s all we have here.” Fifteen minutes to decide her life. She checks herself in a compact mirror and smoothes her hair. She looks at the tobacco stains on her fingertips, and wonders if her parents will notice. If they’re there.
She walks into the terminal not knowing what to expect. Not one of the thousand scenes that have played out in her mind prepares her for what she sees. There, in the concrete-walls-and-plastic-chairs bus terminal in Traverse City, Michigan, stands a group of forty brothers and sisters and great-aunts and uncles and cousins and even her grandmother. And taped across the entire wall of the terminal is a banner that reads, “Welcome Home!”
Out of the crowd of cheers and well-wishers breaks her Dad. She stares out through the tears quivering in her eyes like hot mercury and begins the memorized speech, “Dad, I’m sorry. I know….”
He interrupts her. ‘Hush child. We’ve got no time for that. No time for apologies. You’ll be late for the party. A banquet’s waiting for you at home.'”
“Comfort, O comfort My people,” says your God.
“Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
And call out to her, that her time of compulsory service in warfare is finished,
That her wickedness has been taken away,,
That she has received from the Lord’s hand
Double for all her sins.”
“A voice of one is calling out,
“Clear the way for the Lord in the wilderness;;
Make straight and smooth in the desert a highway for our God.
“Every valley shall be raised,
And every mountain and hill be made low;
And let the rough ground become a plain,
And the rugged places a broad valley.
“And the glory and majesty and splendor of the Lord will be revealed,
And all humanity shall see it together;
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken it.”
The prodigal son, as retold by Philip Yancey and Isaiah 40:1-5 tell of a God Who is ever waiting for us to turn our gaze back to Him. He is a God Who is not far off but chose to come so near. And all of the wilderness of our lives where we hide from Him and keep Him at arm’s length He longs to make into level ground so that there is nothing keeping Him from getting to us.
In the story of the prodigal we see the mountains and hills where she decides that her Father does not want her good. She declares that she is better off without HIm and runs away. And for a time life is good. She enjoys all of the pleasures that life has to offer and for a while that is enough.
But then the valleys come and the people and pleasures that she once enjoyed and was part of turn on her, and she finds herself on the streets with no protection or provision.
The rough places come as her life on the streets is filled with fear, and cold, and addiction, and she wonders why she ever left her Father in the first place. Then she remembers home and her Father and thinks that even her dog eats better than she does.
So she takes a chance because she has nothing to loose.. One.. two.. Three phone calls where she finally leaves a voice message telling of coming home if only her Father will allow her to come home…
And then the long journey and the bus stops, 15 minutes only, and the girl doesn’t know what to expect…she steps out of the bus and see a crowd; aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, cousins, and her Father… Dad I am so sorry. Her Father responds that there is no time for that, there is a banquet to go to and she is the guest of honor.
Within the landscapes our hearts where we have become a prodigal and are far from home God is inviting us this Advent to come home to Him. The mountains and hills where we stand proudly in defiance against our need for God…
in our valleys where we have allowed fear, and anxiety to talk louder than God’s love for us…
in our rough places where we have allowed confusion and frustration to distract us.
God is inviting us home to Him. All we need to do is turn our gaze back to Him.
Before we switch gears for the rest of the night I would like us all to take a couple minutes to sit with God.
Ask Him to highlight one or two prodigal areas of life where God would like you to come home to HIm.
It could be a mountain where you are trying to live out of our own strength,
…It could be a valley where you have allowed fear and anxiety, to have a louder voice that God in your life,
…it could be a rough place where confusion or frustration has caused you to lose sight of God.
You will find a worksheet on the table that might be a helpful tool as you listen to what God is inviting you into this Advent. The is power in naming and confessing where we need to turn back to our Father, God.
Bethany Roan ©