Prodigal in Crisis: How to Help Your Prodigal When They Hit Rock Bottom
Excerpted from The Road Home.
Now when he had spent everything, a severe famine occurred in that country, and he began to be impoverished. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. And he would have gladly filled his stomach with the pods that the swine were eating, and no one was giving anything to him. But when he came to his senses, he said, “How many of my father’s hired men have more than enough bread, but I am dying here with hunger! I will get up and go to my father, and will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in your sight; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me as one of your hired men’” (Luke 15:14-19 NASB).
“Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”
This is Murphy’s Law. Maybe you’ve experienced a few seasons in your life when this seemed to be true. I’ve had my share of times when it seemed as though everything was going bad, all at the same time. My kids were sick, our car broke down, we got an unexpected bill, I received bad news from a family member, I had a hurtful conversation with a friend, and we had financial pressures, deadlines, health challenges, etc. During one of these seasons, I remember thinking, What can I focus on that won’t make me upset!?
In the Prodigal Son parable, we read that the younger son squandered his inheritance and ran out of money in a foreign country. In the previous chapter, we explored what it meant culturally that the son asked for his inheritance prematurely, and we watched his decision to move away and party. He par- tied so hard that he burned through his inheritance and had nothing to show for his choices.
He lost his fair-weather friends and had nothing left when a famine hit the country. In this foreign country, with no money, no friends, no resources, and experiencing famine, what could this man do?
It seems to be the perfect storm for the younger son, since all of his wealth is gone at the same time the country is experiencing a famine: Murphy’s Law. It seems as if there’s only one thing for the younger son to do and that is to join himself to a citizen in that country.
The Greek verb that is used to communicate joining is the word κολλάω. This is an interesting word because it means “to glue or adhere, intimately connected in a soul-knit friendship.” It doesn’t imply a transactional relationship, like getting paid for doing work or bartering to exchange services for food or lodging. This is not a cause-and-effect verb, but more like an attaching or connecting. What we see through the use of this verb is that the younger son connected to the citizen in hopes of getting something (food, lodging, safety, protection, etc.), but it wasn’t a mutually agreed upon relationship.
The younger son connected to the citizen in hopes of getting something, but it wasn’t a mutually agreed upon relationship.
I often travel internationally for the work I do with Saving Moses, a nonprofit that I started that saves babies by meeting the most urgent and intense survival needs where help is least available. The countries where we work are very poor, and it’s not unusual when we drive places around a large city and come to a stop that we are swarmed with people washing the windows, shining the car, cleaning the headlights and more, all in hopes of getting a few coins from us before the light turns green and we drive away. It’s this kind of action that gives some modern context to the joining that the younger son did with the citizen in the foreign country. He joins himself to the citizen, hoping to have some kind of help or support.
As a result of this joining, the younger son is sent into the citizen’s field to feed his pigs. Remember that Jesus is telling this par- able to a Jewish audience. Because of the ban that the Law gave to Jewish folks regarding associating with pigs, they (especially the religious leaders listening) would be repulsive and highly offended to hear that the younger son associated with pigs. Nevertheless, the younger son is left to feed pigs. We read in verse 16, “And he would have gladly filled his stomach with the pods that the swine were eating, and no one was giving anything to him.”
Family Insight
My name is Francine, and I’m the oldest of the two daughters my parents raised. Since my dad was in the military throughout my childhood, we moved a lot. By the time I was twelve years old, we had moved five times, including being stationed in Germany when I was toddler. Most people think that moving so often made it difficult for me to have friends, but I found ways to cultivate friendships during my upbringing, and I have a few lifelong friends to this day, whom I love deeply.
In relation to my parents, my father was a tank systems maintainer in the Army and my mom worked in the home during my elementary school years. My dad was extremely quiet, never raised his voice, and always maintained a steady demeanor. He was a man of few words and no affection. When he worked all day, he came home and worked on projects in and around the house. His interactions with my sister and me were giving directions and instructions but nothing more. My mom affirmed our interests and generally let natural consequences be the feedback for our choices rather than yelling, spanking, or employing strict rules. She made sure that we had transportation to all our activities and regular meals at home. Our dinner times were fairly quiet and without tension or conflicts.
In third grade, I began taking saxophone lessons, and this became my main interest throughout my schooling, outside of my academic achievements, which were very important to me. For my academic achievements, I never received compliments or accolades from my parents, but I was highly internally motivated to get good grades and straight As. In addition to saxophone lessons, I taught myself other wind instruments and joined a variety of bands from elementary school through part of my university studies. I was part of the marching band, symphonic band, jazz band, concert band, and all things band.
While I was always busy with band practices and performances, I found my closest friendships from our church attendance every Sunday, which usually lasted almost all day. These friendships were really great for me, and some of them have remained with me for more than four decades.
Because I was a fairly sensitive child, it didn’t take much to correct me or for me to align with my parents’ wishes and desires. My parents didn’t raise their voices, nor were they heavy disciplinarians. They also didn’t demand high achievements from me. Maybe that’s because I was strongly motivated within myself. To that end, I worked hard to get full-ride scholarships to college and carve out a career for myself from my Bachelor of Science in Math.
While Francine’s “Family Insight” doesn’t have an explicit Murphy’s Law experience, it’s helpful, nonetheless, to have this insight into her upbringing. In relation to our parable, let’s remember that the son is living in a foreign country, which means he doesn’t have resources available to him that would have been available in his own country. His party friends didn’t stick around to help him, nor is he a citizen in this country. Consequently, he’s detached from community support, like his home village. He is basically a homeless vagrant. Furthermore, he has partied away all of his money, so he’s not able to “buy” any friendship.
On top of all this, the country where he’s living begins to experience a famine, so people there are less inclined to be char- itable and generous. From what we read about the foreign cit- izen to whom our son joined himself, it appears that he’s not very helpful. I make this observation because he doesn’t give the younger son any food. Indeed, no one gives him any food. He gets so hungry that he’s inclined to eat the pig slop that he’s giving to the pigs. We read that he would have gladly filled his stomach with the pods the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything.
What could pig slop look like at this time? In the simplest definition, pig slop is made up of everything that’s waste from a kitchen: corn cobs, sour milk, spoiled fruits and veggies, egg shells, food scraps, peels from fruits and veggies, onion tops, etc. Generally, whatever the humans didn’t eat was given to the pigs for slop. This son was so hungry that he wanted to eat the pig food, but this wasn’t available to him.
What the younger son is experiencing is due to his choices.
The convergence of all these bad things seems to be the quintessential Murphy’s Law, except for this noteworthy con- sideration: what the younger son is experiencing is due to his choices. These are the choices that this son made:
He dishonored his dad.
He packed up all his stuff and took his inheritance.
He moved to a foreign country.
In that country, he squandered his inheritance on frivolous living.
Family Insight
My name is Sophia, and my parents have three children: my brother who is eight years older than me, and my little brother who is four years younger than me. My mom told me that she and dad had tried for quite some time to have children, hence the long gaps in the ages between my siblings and me. Because there’s such a big age difference between my brother and me, I kind of grew up as an only child, until my little brother came along.
Before he came on the scene, I played with my mom all the time—dolls, make-believe castles, decorating cookies, planting flowers, baking zucchini bread, and dressing up as beauty queens. We also got our nails done, and I loved when she’d fix up my hair with the curling iron, hair spray, and rollers.
As for my dad, he seemed to be mostly occupied with his job, my older brother’s athletic competitions, and watching baseball on TV in the summer. I also remember my dad teaching my brother about changing the oil in his car because the oil stain in the garage from dad’s lesson never disappeared, even though my mom scrubbed it for a long time.
She wasn’t happy about the stain, which made sense to me because we routinely cleaned the house and worked hard to keep it orderly and tidy. My dad and older brother, not so much. Sometimes, this was a point of contention, but mostly my family was pretty happy and kind to each other.
When I started school, I totally loved it! I earned good grades, and I was often the teacher’s pet. In elementary school, we had a theater / drama class, which is where I discovered my joy in acting and singing. Whenever there was an opportunity to act, join a play, sing, or perform, I’d do my best to audition for a part, or at least be on the support crew for any production.
The biggest hurt in my upbringing was when my family would make snide comments about people in the LGBTQ community while watching a TV show, movie, or seeing one of “them” at a school event. I found their comments to be extremely hurtful, and their posture made it all the more difficult to let them know I’m a lesbian, which I did in my early 20s. By this point, my older brother had his own home and was established in his business career. My younger brother was finishing up high school, so the conversations in the family were initially stressful around the subject of my identity. After some time, everyone figured out how to be settled with me, and I’m grateful to have loving and supportive parents and brothers. I have several friends who don’t have loving families, which makes me all the more thankful for mine.
The Help
Over the course of this parable, each of our main characters (the younger son, older son, and father) has important engagements with various servants, hirelings, and house help. We’ll see how these various workers and supports helped each of the main characters in different ways.
Starting with the younger son, he remembers day workers who are engaged by his dad. This memory provides a stark
contrast with his fully ravenous condition, which sparks an idea in his mind. At this position of rock bottom, the son has an epiphany. The Greek uses the phrase, “he came to himself.” In this epiphany, the son reflects on life at his home where the hired hands have more than enough bread to eat. The word in the Greek that is used for hired hands is the word μίσθιος (mis- thios), and it means “a paid worker, hired servant, hireling.”5 This is a person who does a job and gets paid (food) for doing the job.
As we consider the reflection of the younger son, we see that he was aware of not only his home life, but the people who were hired by his dad. He knew how his dad treated these workers or hirelings. There were provisions and fair payment for the household laborers.
The younger son works out a plan so that he can get food in exchange for being a day laborer for his dad. No doubt, he would have to humble himself and accept that his actions and words to his father at the beginning of the story postured him no longer to be a son in his father’s family. Additionally, he would have to suffer the outrage and rejection from his village for his dishonorable behaviors, never mind showing up with his emaciated, smelly, ugly, dirty, and scantily clothed body.
It seems to be that when we are at our lowest point, we often have clarity about the decisions that we must make. Maybe we feel all the lack, discomfort, hunger, shame, isolation, pain, and misery when we hit rock bottom. Such realizations can facilitate powerful motivations to get away from our painful reality. There are no shortages of examples of people who found themselves at the bottom of their life and made powerful decisions to get away from that bottom.
It seems to be that when we are at our lowest point, we often have clarity about the decisions that we must make.
This reminds me of one of my friends who grew up in a fairly affluent family. She had lots of encouragement and resources to go to college and “make something of herself.” When she graduated high school, she decided to do a gap year. A few decades later, she still wishes that she’d skipped this idea and went the college education route. Although she traveled the world, saw incredible sights, and enjoyed a wide range of experiences, many of her experiences were not so good.
When she came home from her gap year, she had lots of health struggles (because of STDs), she had a dependency on drugs, and her parents had to hire multiple exterminators to get rid of all the mites, bedbugs, chiggers, and vermin that she brought home with her. After a few months and lots of support with tearful conversations, my friend decided to go to a local HVAC trade school, get the training and a few years of experience in this profession that she needed. Today, she owns her own HVAC company and has let the lessons she learned after her gap year serve as reminders of “never going back to those dark days.”
Similar to my friend, the younger son chose to humble himself when he hit the bottom. He repented and returned to his dad to ask to be a day laborer. He did this for the simple reason that he could count on eating every day as a hireling, rather than pining to eat pig slop that never materialized. Humility and bread were better than pigs, starvation, and isolation. I’d suggest that the younger son returned to his dad as a different person than the hurtful son who dishonored his dad and left home with his inheritance.
As we finish looking at the younger son, let’s reflect on what he decided to say to his dad after he came to his senses. Here are a few translations to help you have a more colorful picture of this son’s planned greeting with his dad:
Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants (ESV).
Father, I’ve sinned against God, I’ve sinned before you; I don’t deserve to be called your son. Take me on as a hired hand (MSG).
Father, I was wrong. I have sinned against you. I’ll never again be worthy to be called your son. Please, Father, just treat me like one of your employees (TPT).
It’s important to note that the first word he planned to say was, “Father” implying family connection and position. Upon making this statement, he immediately acknowledges his wrong- doing and hurtful decisions, along with the loss of his position in the family. We can see from his words that the rock-bottom experience had recalibrated his thinking to recognize that he no longer deserved to be called “son.” He had gone far beyond the point of no return with his dad, and he was painfully aware of this reality.
The Audience
As we finish our deep-dive exploring for the younger son in this parable, let’s keep in mind who is listening to Jesus tell this parable. Remember that in Luke 15:1-2 we read that the sinners and tax collectors were coming to hear Jesus, while the religious leaders were complaining about such reprobates and losers. In this story, maybe Jesus was referring to the sinners and tax collectors when He described the younger brother, since he wasn’t interested in being proper, righteous, or maintaining customary respect for his dad or inheritance.
Maybe you partied away your inheritance and squandered your resources with stupid choices. Maybe you live in the shame and loss of our decisions, and perhaps your regrets are weightier than your pleasures. If you relate to the younger son in this parable, be grateful that your Father’s love can be the final solution rather than the ongoing hurt and humiliation from riotous living and poor choices.