Thoughts from a Prodigal

Until this past week, I never fully understand what it meant to be a prodigal. I always thought that the story of the prodigal son was meant for those believers who had really walked away from God, completely strayed from the faith. That was never me. Even in the worst moments of my life, I never totally left God. Sure, I would get angry, discontent and refuse to obey, but that didn't make me a prodigal. Or so I thought. I've decided that since I've come to college, God has had enough of all my foolish thoughts, and He's systematically destroying them. But being the stubborn person I am, He's been forced to hit me over the head with a 2x4....more than once. That's the story of my life, especially my spiritual walk. The worst part is when you realize that He's showing you something, you think you've got it all figured out, then you realize that He was actually teaching you something else entirely.

A few weeks ago, I thought God was teaching me to simply trust Him and to just be still and know.
Then I decided that, while that's a valuable lesson, God actually wanted me to learn to trust Him with my future and to just do what He wants me to do right now.
Once again, a lesson that needed to be learned, but most recently, I "discovered" it was actually that I just needed to have the faith of a child and not let everything get so complicated.

I think God's finally had enough.

First, I'm an idiot. Especially when it comes to God. I yell and scream at Him, try to figure Him out, and in the end, all that happens is that I realize that I'm an idiot. When you try too hard to look for the lessons of your life when you're in the middle of the storm, you just complicate things. It's the moment when you actually stop fighting Him that you realize where you went wrong.

Which brings me back to being a prodigal.

Being a prodigal doesn't mean that you've utterly left God. It doesn't mean that you've disowned Him. We become a prodigal child anytime we don't follow Him. Just like there aren't degrees of sin, there aren't degrees of leaving God. When we don't obey Him, are we really doing any better than a person who has lost faith? In our own way, we've lost faith. We've refused to trust Him and His commands.

If we continue on that path, He'll find a way to get through. That's the lesson He was teaching me. That I needed to stop fighting. All those other lessons were mere subsets of the larger picture. If we try to learn those lessons on our own without His help, or we simply refuse to be taught, He'll find a way to get through. He'll utterly crush us if that's what it takes.

There's a surprising peace after you've been crushed.

It's a peace that cannot be ignored. It rushed over you, drowning you within itself. It calms the trembling, it eases the hurt. It lifts you up. Once again, you are in your Father's arms. From there, who would want to run?

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing. C. S. Lewis