Still Watching the Road
Daily Scripture
Luke 15:17-20
When he came to his senses, he said, “How many of my father’s hired hands have more than enough food, but I’m starving to death! I will get up and go to my father, and say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I no longer deserve to be called your son. Take me on as one of your hired hands.'” So he got up and went to his father. While he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was moved with compassion. His father ran to him, hugged him, and kissed him.
Daily Reflection & Prayer
Jesus told a story about a father with two sons. The younger son asked for his inheritance early, left home, and spent everything on reckless living. When a famine hit the country he was living in, he took the only job he could find, feeding pigs, and got hungry enough to envy what they were eating.
That’s the moment this passage picks up. Starving and out of options, the son finally comes to his senses and decides to go home.
The son’s plan, when he finally decides to go home, is to be hired, not forgiven. He’s rehearsed a speech asking for nothing more than a job and a roof, since that seems like the best he can realistically hope for. He isn’t counting on his father’s love. He’s counting on his father’s need for cheap labor. That says something honest about what guilt does to a person’s sense of what they’re allowed to hope for.
What the son doesn’t know, walking up that road rehearsing his speech, is that his father has been watching for him the whole time. The text says he saw his son “while he was still a long way off,” which means someone was looking. Not glancing occasionally. Watching, the way an older parent watches for a grown child who left and never fully stopped hoping they’d come back. John Wesley, commenting on this very verse, wrote that the father “pities, meets, embraces him, and interrupts his acknowledgments”* before the son ever finishes explaining himself. Grace gets there first. The father doesn’t wait for the apology to be delivered. He runs, which was not a dignified thing for a man of his age and status to do in that culture, and reaches his son before a single word of the rehearsed speech is spoken. His compassion moves faster than his son’s shame.
- The son rehearsed exactly what he would say before he ever faced his father. Think about something you’ve been afraid to bring to God, a confession, a request, an honest complaint, because you weren’t sure how he’d respond. What’s kept you from bringing it to him?
- The father’s compassion reached his son before the apology was even finished. Think about a time someone extended you grace before you had fully explained yourself or made things right. How did that change what you believed about their love for you?
Prayer
Father, thank you for running toward me before I’ve even finished explaining myself. Forgive me for the times I’ve talked myself into believing I only deserve the minimum, when you’ve been watching the road all along, ready to close the distance. Give me eyes to see who around me might be walking home right now, whether that’s my own child, my parent, or someone else I love, and give me the courage to run to meet them. Let your compassion be the truest thing I believe about you, truer than my shame and truer than my fear. Amen.
GPS Insights
Lauren Cook
Lauren Cook serves as the Director of Online Engagement and Entry Points at Resurrection.
Guilt and shame are powerful, powerful emotions. Not only are they aggressive in how pervasive they are, refusing to be ignored for even a moment, but they are also incredibly manipulative to our own narratives.
One year for Lent, instead of giving up candy or sweets or social media, I decided to try to give up ruminating. I am a major ruminator—especially in the car. I play scenarios out (both those that have happened and those that have yet to happen) over and over and over and I rehearse my responses to them. I play out different ways of saying different things, I imagine how the others in the scenario will react and respond themselves… It’s honestly exhausting in its intensity and consistency. So, I tried to give up this bad habit.
It was really hard! It’s hard to control and turn off that voice in our head. The voice that stems from different things, but so often from feelings of guilt and/or shame. The voice that highlights that thing we said that we shouldn’t have, the thing we did or left undone, the thing we could have done differently. The voice that so quickly turns from what actually happened to what that says about us, about who we are, about our worth.
And there is the root problem: Guilt and shame become story-dwellers. They don’t tell the actual story, but they burrow deep into the story we’re telling ourselves and begin to mold the story into something that can change what we believe about ourselves (Riley’s sense of self, anyone?!). We begin to believe that we aren’t worthy of love, forgiveness, or grace but only of such guilt, shame, and anxiety. We begin to believe that one bad act makes us a bad person.
We begin to believe that we are fully and only human in our sinfulness and we lose sight of the divine inside of us that calls us beloved, chosen, forgiven, and His.
What an incredible gift that even when I am stuck in my own rumination, there is a God who bursts forth and interrupts every thought, every word, every emotion and reminds me of who I am and whose I am before I can explain it all away.
He does the same for you. So, before you fall into the trap of guilt, shame, anxiety, or anything else the world or your own mind is screaming at you and before you try to explain how your thing really WAS that bad, remember this: He is already there. He never left. His love never stopped flowing and will not. He has already covered that story, that shame, that sorrow with an overflowing well of mercy, grace, and unconditional love. And this is the story that we can ruminate on.
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Scripture quotations are taken from The Common English Bible ©2011. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
References
* John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament, on Luke 15:20 (1754).
