I’ve been caught by the Father’s arms this year.
I know it because He has hemmed me in. I’ve experienced Him answer my prayers left and right. As every season turns its corner and I expect His miraculous provision to cease, healing, redemption, and restitution rush in. In fact, His provision has been so bountiful that I’ve begun to wonder if the anomaly isn’t His capacity for giving but my expectation for receiving.
Sometimes we go through hard things that knock us down, and other times we are that hard thing. When I think of the prodigal son, I picture the societal outcast who has turned his back on the church and pursued every other form of worldly substitute for the God-sized hole in the heart.
But sometimes prodigal children look more like good Christian men and women experiencing a prodigal season. This season may be brought on for people by past trauma, pain, loss, or grief, yet in the end, it lies within themselves.
To heal such a wound requires, I am convinced, a tangible experience of the heavenly Father rushing towards you with a ring and a robe… perhaps even multiple experiences, again and again, until your heart receives the truth.
WHO IS THE PRODIGAL?
Luke 15:11-32 details how the younger son of a wealthy man leaves home with his inheritance, squanders it, and returns to beg his father for a servant’s position. Dr. Clark describes the situation of the prodigal son as a “bunkhouse”:
“You have fallen into a trap of the enemy, and he has convinced you that though you are forgiven, you are no longer worthy to be in your Father’s presence in the big house… you have relegated yourself to the bunkhouse, the migrant shack where the servants live… you have decided that it is good enough to be a servant, to have just food and clothes, to be cared for by God because you know God will take care of His servants.”1
Sometimes we aren’t even aware that we are falling into such a trap. Like the prodigal son, we leave home confidently bearing our Father’s inheritance, intent on pursuing our dreams and living life to the fullest. Perhaps we have even left home in good grace, blessed to leave and pursue the calling of the Lord.
Life goes well enough and then somewhere along the way our hearts wander. Perhaps we grow distracted or are lulled to sleep by routine. At some point, perhaps our heart awakens, feeling the absence of the Father, which if left unaddressed pushes our hearts farther still. While Jesus’ words about lukewarm spirituality in Revelation 3:16 read as judgement, they accurately warn us about a dangerous state of the heart: falling asleep to the Father’s love.
Alternatively, sometimes we enter a wilderness or valley season that gets to us. Wildernesses are time-sensitive and liminal. They transport you from here to there. When the Father led his children into the wilderness—the newly-freed Israelite people from Egypt, Moses, David, the prophets, Jesus Himself—they always emerged victorious. Even when the Israelites remained in the wilderness an extra 40 years because of their disobedience, He still brought them into the promised land.
Yet sometimes we seem to get stuck in the wilderness. We go around and around the same turn but never seem to reach the daylight. I’m not sure why this happens. I’m torn over whether such a wilderness is divinely orchestrated, the plot of the enemy, or the consequence of human resistance and depravity.
I do know that God will rescue us when we cry out to Him—yet sometimes in the space between, we fall into a bunkhouse mindset: that life right now is just the way it’s supposed to be. In fact, sometimes our own hearts anchor us to the wilderness.
And sometimes we just have never grasped the fullness of what God has for us. Much like Dr. Clark before he encountered God, we never realized that God wanted to use “little ol’ me” for so much more. Sometimes we receive salvation and remain at the outskirts, in the bunkhouse, because we never realized our Kingdom position.
Our world is broken, and it is far too easy to become a prodigal child. You might have rejected God or be stumbling through life, unsure of how He really feels about you. Perhaps you feel like you don’t matter or you’re not good enough, like there’s always something to prove. Perhaps you’re just tired. Tired of asking without receiving.
Dear friend, I’ve been there too. Most of us have been. In fact, sometimes I think parts of my heart are still stranded in the bunkhouse, and I wonder how do I get home?
THE PRODIGAL SON’S FATHER
One time a father figure in my life sat me down at his table with his wife. Looking me in the eyes he said, “Ana, we’ve sensed some nervousness from you around us. We just want you to know the trial is over. We adore you completely, and you are accepted in our home. So you don’t need to perform anymore, and it’s okay to be completely yourself.”
I could scarcely look at them through blurred eyes. I knew there had never truly been a trial, but hearing those words knocked something off the shelves of my heart.
While time and space have since put distance between those words and their speaker, I still carry them today as a message directly from the Father.
In the parable itself, when the prodigal son was “still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him” (Luke 15: 20).
“‘Father,’” the son replied, “‘I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son,'” to which the father instructs his servants, “‘Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet… my son was dead, and is alive again’” (Luke 15:22-24).
At the son’s worst, the father utterly accepted him as his own.
If you haven’t heard it said before, there truly is nothing and no one that can keep us from being loved by God—not even ourselves (Romans 8:38-39).
More than that, such extravagance is always available. Dismayed by the father’s treatment of the prodigal as opposed to himself, the oldest son also falls into the bunkhouse. The father has to remind him that all that remains—the entirety of the father’s possessions—are his.
Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and the door shall be opened (Matthew 7:7). We know these words, but do we follow them? What if we pursued the Father knowing His identity as the One “who is able to do far more abundantly than all we ask or think”? (Ephesians 3:20).
So many times this year I have journaled, “Father, I need…” He has come through not once, not twice, but every time. I need your inner-healing, Father. I need someone to send me an encouraging text today. I need a sign that grad school is the right choice. I need help clearing my schedule so I can rest. I need a love encounter with you this week.
Sometimes I even journal, “Father, I want…” I want a good hug from a friend. I want to find a dusty rose pillow for my bed. I want to see a glimpse of Your beauty today. I want to be a blessing to somebody this week and also to find that Maryilnne Robinson book at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore.
I don’t think the Father is a genie who gives us anything and everything. That wouldn’t be good for us. He doesn’t always provide exactly what I want when I want it. Sometimes He just asks, “What do you like about that?”
Yet I have been surprised this year with His extravagance. Surely the Father who loves to give good and perfect gifts will at some point run out of gifts or want to stop giving?
He hasn’t.
So I begin to wonder whether His desires have changed, or whether He really was such a good gift-giver all along, and I just never saw it? Perhaps in fact, I am changing. I’m leaving the bunkhouse.
BEING FOUND BY HIM
The prodigal son chose to come home. More specifically, he wanted to come home. And he didn’t even make it home before the father found him.
It is easy to picture the prodigal son’s father running towards him, arms open wide. The tearful, confessional, heart-wrenching embrace of two souls reconnecting.
What would this picture look like if the father had tried to embrace the son while he was leaving home?
The Father knows how to chase us down. He knows how to speak to our hearts and to find every lost and wandering sheep. He could have found the prodigal son in the pig pen as well as the neighborhood road. Yet there is something about the home-bound heart that makes one easier to be found.
If we do not want God, how will he adorn us with His ring and robe?
I suppose part of going through a prodigal season is the experience of not wanting or seeking God. We may have forgotten how good He is, feel doubtful of His personal interest, be rebelling against His ways, or simply feel numb and asleep. Perhaps we are angry at Him and stuck in our grief.
The Father holds no shame for prodigals. He simply wants us back, and when we turn to Him at last—recognizing how far from home we are and how desperately we need Him—He locks us in His arms. His love, in fact, is prodigious and ready to make up for lost time.
READ MORE:
Randy Clark, Out of the Bunkhouse Core Message, (Mechanicsburg, PA: self-published, 2010).
- Randy Clark, Out of the Bunkhouse Core Message, (Mechanicsburg, PA: self-published, 2010), 37. ↩︎