Liminality

I can’t stop thinking about how I so often play the role of the older brother in the Prodigal Son parable. When the prodigal son returns home, the older brother is filled with anger, resentment, and envy. He storms away from the festival unable to celebrate. I can hear him saying, “Why should my rug rat of a brother, the abomination to the family, the lustful lunatic who squanders away everything get the fattened calf, the best seat in the house? What about my efforts, my works? Why don’t I get recognized? I’ll never forget a time in college when I was leading a bible study. We were talking about how our lives should be a living prayer. Someone asked me that night to give an accurate account of how many times I bowed my head and prayed during a day. I couldn’t think of a day that I did it more than three. From the back of the room I was chastised publically for not being a good enough Christian by a girl who I knew quite well. I remember thinking to myself, “How dare s...

On a dusty, long day in the field the father of the prodigal son looks up from his plow and sees a silhouette on the horizon. The oldest son approaches and asks, “Were we expecting guests tonight?” “No son, not tonight.” “Well who do you think that may be?” And in a relieved breathe the father says, “He’s alive; he’s come home!” With haste the father breaks through the field lines, jumps the fence, heads for the street, runs to his boy, and filled with compassion, embraces his boy with a holy hug. All the brokenness, all the shame, all the hurt that boy was carrying is gone. Forgiven. Forgotten in the beauty of the compassionate embrace. The holy hug. Immediately the father retrieves his royal robe, rings, and kills the fattened calf and prepares a feast for the prodigal son’s honor. Returning home, returning to the presence of God carries with it, forgiveness, grace, and mercy. Every time we return home our brokenness is forgotten. Our sins are forgiven. Ou...

Long ago God spoke to ancestors by the prophets . . . this is all well and good but what about now? Can we hear God’s voice? There are times when God’s presence seems to be missing; God’s voice goes unheard. I will never forget my first ever at-bat as a freshman baseball player at Belmont University. To this day I’m not sure how it happened. It had never happened to me before, and there was no reason for me to suspect it would happen here. I was a decent hitter but the odds were probably one in a million. The pitch came, I loaded my stance, I thought of everything in that split second: hips, hands, torque, table-top swing, bat speed, acceleration . . . and then . . . I heard it. Not the smack of the catcher’s mitt, not the ping of bat . . . my face. In all my thinking, in all my strategy, I forgot to get out of the way of the ball. It hit me square on my left eye. 86mph of force right to the orbital. I wish I could say I handled this like a champ but I went down hard. ...