The Long Wait for a Prodigal

There is a phone number in that house that has not changed in eleven years, and the reason has never once been said at the table. Better arrangements have come and gone. Her daughter has offered twice to sort it out for her. She says she cannot be doing with the hassle, and everybody accepts that, because it sounds exactly like the sort of thing a woman of her age would say.

It is the number he knows. That is all it is. If he ever stands somewhere with a phone in his hand and gets as far as dialling, she is not going to be the reason it does not connect.

She does other things too, and none of them are visible from outside. She keeps the spare key where it has always been. She has not turned his old room into the office, although the office would be genuinely useful and she has run out of reasons that hold up under questioning. On the fourth Sunday of every month she puts his name into the prayer at church without saying it out loud, because saying it out loud invites the follow up question, and the follow up question brings the pity, and the pity has become unbearable in a way it was not in the first year.

And you know the arithmetic of your own version, and how careful you have become about who is allowed to see it. It has been longer than you say. When someone asks, you give the rounded number, the softer one, the one that does not change their face. You are so tired. You have prayed the same prayer so many times that the words have gone smooth, the way a stone step wears down in the middle, and you have begun to wonder in the small hours whether any of it is landing anywhere at all.

Whose child is it

Start where the psalm starts, because it will hold your weight.

Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit of the womb is his reward.Psalm 127:3

The word rendered heritage is nachalah. It is an inheritance word, and specifically it is the word used for the land portions given to the tribes. A nachalah is not wages. Nobody performed well enough to receive one. It is assigned by covenant, it is held rather than achieved, and in the law of Israel it cannot be permanently sold away from the family it belongs to. At the Jubilee it returns.

Now hold the second half of the phrase, because that is the part that changes what you do tonight. A heritage of the LORD. Not from Him only. His. They came from His hand into yours, and the fact that they are currently out of your sight has not moved them one inch out of His.

I want to be careful and honest with you here, because I would rather give you something true than something comforting that comes apart later. I cannot tell you when. I cannot tell you what they are going to choose, because God Himself does not force a human will, and He has never once treated love as something to be compelled. Anyone who hands you a date is handing you something that does not belong to them.

But there is a great deal I can tell you, and it is not small.

You have been carrying this as though the whole weight of that person's future is sitting on the quality of your prayers. It is not. That is the burden that has made this so heavy, and it was never assigned to you. Your prayers are not a machine that has failed to produce. You are not the load bearing wall of another person's soul. Psalm 127:3 calls that child a heritage of the LORD, which is a covenant word and never a wage, and the Holy Spirit has been praying alongside you every one of the nights the words went smooth on you.

And then there is the road.

In the account Jesus told, the son came to himself in a far country and set out for home, and the text says that while he was yet a great way off, his father saw him. Read that once more slowly. The father saw him first. From that distance, at that range, before the boy was recognizable to anybody else on that farm. There is only one way that happens. That father had been looking at that road. Not once. Not on anniversaries. Habitually, for years, in the way a person looks up every time a shape appears at the far end of a lane.

Which means the waiting was not passive and it was never empty. The watching was the love. It was the thing that put the father at the window on the day it finally mattered, and every unrewarded look before that day was part of the same act.

You have been at that window for eleven years, or six, or twenty three. You have thought of it as waste. It is not waste. It is a father's posture, and it is being kept by Someone who is at the same window. That is written into the story Jesus told and it is not my encouragement, and His Spirit is the reason eleven years at the glass are intercession rather than habit.

Because that is the other thing about the story that people miss. The father in that parable is not a picture of you. He is a picture of God. Which means the watching you have been doing alone in a quiet house is the very thing God is doing about that same person, at the same hour, with far better eyes.

He still moves in families. Now, in this decade. Grown children still come back to God from places their parents could not follow them into. It happens in ordinary weeks, without warning, and it very often happens long after everybody around the praying parent had quietly stopped expecting it. You are not praying into a closed sky. The word nowhere describes a God who has gone quiet on a family, and the Spirit of God is at work tonight in a far country nobody has given you the address of.

There is one more line in that story that I think has been used against you, so let me set it the right way up. The son came to himself. Nobody fetched him. The father did not send men out with a cart, and nothing in the account suggests he could have. Which means the turn happened somewhere the father could not see, in a country he had never been to, in a moment he knew nothing about until a shape appeared at the end of the lane.

Take the pressure out of that rather than the hope. You were never the one who could produce the turning, so the years in which it has not come are not your failure. And whatever is happening in that far country is not visible to you, which cuts both ways. You do not get to see the pig field. You also do not get to see the hour something begins to shift. Absence of evidence in your kitchen is not evidence of absence in their heart.

And whatever you have been telling yourself about how it got this far, put it down. Praying parents replay the decisions endlessly, the year they moved schools, the thing they said in that argument, the hundred small hinges. That inventory is not repentance and it is not intercession. It is grief with a clipboard, and it will keep you up without helping anyone. Set the clipboard down. The written word never once made that turning your work, and the Holy Spirit is already moving in the place a clipboard has never once been able to reach.

And notice what the psalm says two lines earlier. Except the LORD builds the house, they labor in vain that build it. And then, immediately, that He gives His beloved sleep. That is not a rebuke to a tired parent. That is God taking the night shift. You have been trying to hold a house up with your own arms at two in the morning, and He is telling you that the building is His work, and that rest is not desertion of your post.