The Heritage Tour -- the Epilogue

"Well, the Prodigal returns," she said as I schmoozed among the filling pews. Ironic, since the "Heritage Tour" had begun with a reflection on this very biblical story.

We arrived home last night after twelve long but pleasant hours in the car. In the previous eight days we had visited the city of my rearing, cities of interest, the family farm, and the city of my higher education. We had reconnected with parents, childhood friends, brother and family, daughter and, as the name implies, heritage. And though relationally warm and wonderful and renewing and nostalgic, it almost always comes with melancholic tightening of the chest when the car noses its way back into the garage, anticipation is replaced by memory, and the washer and dryer spin and tumble away all physical traces of the trek. It was a wonderful trip, and it is wonderful to be home. Still...

"So, the Prodigal returns," she said, and the lighthearted observation raised a question. A friend sitting in a pew near enough to overhear asked, "Do you feel more like a Prodigal returning there, or returning here?" And the honest truth is, I don't know. There is, as I later observed, something wonderful about touching again the soil in which my roots spread; likewise wonderful about this place on which my branches have since been grafted. I suppose I'm grateful that -- save in a strict, residential sense -- I don't have to choose. Yet with Texas in my soul and Iowa in my veins, it's not always clear just which -- if either -- is home.

And so the Prodigal returns, indeed -- first there and now here. But in the parable, the younger son returns only after he "came to himself," and feeling now like a tourist there and a still a transplant here, I hardly know any longer where such a "coming" takes me. Perhaps the task -- perhaps the blessing -- is finding oneself wherever one chooses to be, on the banks of whatever pond, under whatever tree, among those chosen to accompany you. And, giving thanks for all that has prepared the way, finding in the being...

...home.

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The Prodigal Returns

My older brother and I once worked up a musical narration of the parable of the Prodigal Son told from a first-person perspective. We would talk a little, sing a little, and with what we hoped was a touch of dramatic effect, got the points of the story across -- he, the older brother; me the younger. And we had fun with the telling; had fun in the telling of it together.

I recalled that memory this morning during worship at my home church as the minister first read and then preached on this familiar story. We have travelled to Texas, my wife and I and two friends, on a sort of "heritage tour," and home church, at least where my family is concerned, is almost synonymous with home.

Perhaps the memory came to me simply because of the narrative connection -- but then I have heard and preached, myself, on the story a dozen times or more over the years and no been similarly taken aside by the flashback. Perhaps it was because this younger son, not 50-years-old, who has moved so far away from home, had returned. And though I don't feel as though I have "squandered my inheritance in dissolute living" -- I have been serving churches all these years, for heaven's sake -- I nonetheless always return to the welcoming embrace of the congregation that formed me full of humility. At other times and in other places I can find myself feeling some cockiness if I'm not careful. But not here, not among these people who know better. Whatever the joy with which they welcome me, no matter the pride they express about me, I know -- and they know -- that I have been among them as squirrely grade-schooler, goofy and gangly teenager, and awkward adolescent. In other words, they know me naked.

It's not that I ever embarrassed them or gave them cause to be ashamed. It's just that they know me, not as a role but as a person. I am not "Pastor" here; I'm simply "Tim" -- Chris and Merita's son; Craig's little brother. Me, with all the accretions of time and accomplishment stripped away.

If it's not quite like the Prodigal returning home, it's close enough for me. the issue is not what I've done or left undone; it isn't about success or failure. The question is never "why," but simply "where have you been?" and the assurance that "it's great to have you home." And nothing else really matters --
-- to them or, come to think of it, to me.