There are times when something triggers thoughts, energy, and words in me and I find myself, like the villain in the first Incredibles movie, saying, “You sly dog you got me monologuing!”
Poor Elizabeth…
Recently my thoughts, like a morning fog, drifted over the landscape of my life to a time when everything was clear, binary, black and white, left and right. As I picked up years, like raking leaves in the fall, things became more opaque.
There is a story in the scriptures I love and is well known, concerning what at first glance seems binary in nature. One is right and one is wrong… It’s the story of the prodigal son. In Luke 15:11-32, we have a child who is shackled by his undisciplined, out-of-control desires, and demands his inheritance early, leaving home to seek his fortune. The other son dutifully stays home, also shackled by his own sense of what he thinks is right, his duty, and his thinly veiled ego. They both are captive to their own interpretations of right and wrong. Our story ends with the prodigal coming back home and his father restoring him.
The son I most connected with was the son that stayed home. He had all of the boxes checked, and though he was doing it for what he thought were the right reasons, the return of his brother showed the trembling weakness of his motives. For those watching on the outside, it was clear what the younger brother’s motives were and where his heart was. For most the older brother was ‘right, good, loyal’, and it was harder to see that he was as wrong as his younger brother.
A revelation hit me the other day concerning my own life.
I am the prodigal.
And…
I am the son who stayed home.
Let me expand this…
Years ago all of my religious boxes were checked. From the outside, it was clear I was like the older brother. I graduated from a Christian High School, I went to a Bible College, I married a preacher’s daughter, and became a pastor. I shied away from more worldly temptations. I knew it, God knew it, and somehow that made me feel God was closer to me. It wasn’t ‘known’ pride, it was thinly veiled… it was just part of the package. I knew God loved me and I carried His grace in my pocket like a watch. I would pull it out from time to time, no pun intended, look it over, and move on. I’d say, “Thank you, God,” and I would slide it back into my pocket to be forgotten as I moved on to ‘more ‘important’ things. It eventually became a sort of trophy that sat on my mantle. I would see it when I came home, gathering dust like a long-forgotten collectible of life. Oh, yea, I would pick it up on occasion, and ‘thank God’ for his grace, but I just didn’t get it. My boxes were checked.
I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
I was fulfilling my duty like clockwork but I had no clue how lost I was. As the years wound forward, some bad, bad things happened and hard decisions had to be made. Some were right, some were wrong, some were good, some were bad,
And they ALL had a cost.
And I began to understand how lost I was.
I became a shell of the man I ‘thought’ I was. The debriding God was taking me through was peeling away the veiled ego and pride to show me how little ‘I’ mattered and how much HE did.
Now, as the corporation of my life is more extensive, those religious boxes are all unchecked. I most likely will never be in a pulpit again, I never became a missionary pilot. I am divorced, remarried, and have a grown son and stepchildren. My life in retrospect has many potholes that will never be filled. With these hard road miles of life, I am not the same person I was. It’s changed the dynamic of my relationship with everyone, including God, both for good and bad. Why you may ask… because I now know that I fall into the category of both the prodigal and the son that stayed home.
This isn’t self-condemnation here.
I just understand when I was a child I spoke as a child and thought as a child. However, when I became a man I put away childish things. Now, grace can no longer be carried in my pocket or placed on the mantle…
the mountainous weight of grace is unbearable these days.
As Christians we often speak of the refiner’s fire; the pain, agony, and suffering that leads to change, but I have found that being crushed by grace can bring one to their knees also. As I have gotten older, grace has gotten bigger.
As C.S Lewis wrote:
“Aslan, Said Lucy, “You’re Bigger.” That Is Because You Are Older Little One.” Answered He… Every Year You Grow You Will Find Me BIGGER.”
These days, grace is a word that I utter with reverence. It has weight, like the silence of listening to the earth around you on a snow-blanketed day. The bigness of grace is almost scary, and I’ve begun to understand that only the master of all could make a way through this broken life for me and to stand before Him as His child…
Though and by Grace.
I don’t know about you…but I have found it’s a far, far better place to be buried by an avalanche of grace than to have all of the boxes checked.
