I Am Convinced

          This week’s Gospel reading is the parable of The Prodigal Son.  The parable, a metaphor for our relationship with God, concerns the younger of two sons asking his father for his inheritance early.  The father gives the young man the money, and the son then goes and squanders it in “dissolute living,” really bad and immoral choices.  After the younger brother blows all the money, and eventually comes to his senses, he makes a plan to return home and seek his father’s forgiveness with a grand apology.  The son even plans to beg to live like one of the father’s slaves. 

Now, when the younger son is returning home, but still a long way out, his father sees him from a distance and runs to the son.  Before the younger son can even get his whole apology out, the father stops him, hugs him, and tells the servants to dress the son in new clothes and jewelry, and to start a feast for him. 

          This passage has been analyzed as much as any other passage in the Bible (probably more), and there is not too much I could come up with that would be new.  So, let me tell you which two parts mean the most to me.

          First, we notice that the father sees the son while the son is still a significant distance from home.  That means that the father must have been looking for him to return the whole time, or else the father would not have seen the son while he was still so far away.  The father must have been looking for the son to return the whole time to have seen him the moment he popped over the horizon.     

          What does that mean for us?  It means that we can never do something so wrong that God is not hoping for us to return to Him.  Never, never, never.  God is always looking for us to come back to Him after we have wandered away.  Period, end of story.  In Romans 8:38, St. Paul tells us what he thinks about this.  He says, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  That’s very comforting to me.  Sometimes I feel like there are a lot of things that come between me and God.  But I know in my heart that St. Paul is right; nothing can come between me and God.  Nothing, nothing, nothing. 

          Second, in the parable we see that the son plans out his whole speech, but when he returns home, he can’t get even half of it out before his father cuts him off and tells him how much he loves him.  

What does that mean for us?  That means that we don’t have to pray with eloquent language to connect to God.  God knows what we want before we even say it.  That bodes well for me, too, because I am not at all great at praying.  After many years of trying, I still don’t have a specific method or approach, let alone an established script.  Quite frankly, most of the time I find it difficult to even quiet my mind, let alone come out with a great prayer.  But that’s OK.  A sincere desire to connect to God is the thing.  Great phrasing seems optional at best, unless it helps us frame our thoughts.  Everyone prays differently.  I think we can keep our prayers as simple as possible and still connect with God.        

         

-         The Older Brother