Article December 13, 1982 Issue

Homecoming

CHANNING WALKER

It's an upbeat journey to make. The trip home—say, at Christmas or for summer vacation—includes old friends or family ready to hear the latest success stories and add to the applause. It's a time to bask in the warmth of belonging. Usually.

But there's also a downbeat kind of coming home. It happens after a failed marriage or failed career; after wrecking some special opportunity, perhaps damaging someone close in the process. That journey home can be a humiliating admission of defeat. It's the kind of coming home the prodigal son in Christ Jesus' well-known parable faced. It's the kind not a few of us have had to face somewhere along the way. It's the kind that presents us with a choice: We can sink in despair and self-pity. Or we can wrench a blessing from the experience, climbing to a solid platform from which to launch our life anew. That's always a possibility, no matter how total the failure. There are specific spiritual facts that make this so.

Look how the prodigal dealt with the problem. He had collected his inheritance from his father and then lost it in a wild spree. Broke and friendless, ready to eat the swine's food, is how the Bible describes him. The narrative continues, "And when he came to himself, he said ... I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son .... And he arose, and came to his father."^{Luke 15:17–20.}

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Editorial

On the magnitude of Jesus' mission