Coming Home

"Coming home, coming home,

Never more to roam,

Open wide those arms of love,

Lord, I'm coming home."

             --Old Gospel song

More than anything else, for me Lent is coming home. Nothing captures this idea more than the story of the Prodigal son. We know it like the back of our hands. The boy, mad and foolish, went far from home and found that over there was not all it was cracked up to be. In time, he lost everything and had no place to go. Finally—in desperation he decided to go back home, groveling in the dust, ashamed and embarrassed. Hopefully his father would take him back, maybe as a servant. We know the rest of that story.

Robert Penn Warren had a great novel entitled, A Place to Come To. The setting was the hard, cold mines where work was backbreaking and life was short. In one of those little mining houses, a mother was determined her son would not be stuck there. So as a young adult she pushed him away. She made him leave. She told him he could never come back. She thought if he returned he would and never leave there again. It was the hardest thing she ever did.

Through the years she kept up with him. She missed him terribly—but he never came back. She married again in later life and one day she died. The boy, heart broken and devastated, came home to pay his last respects. The old man she had married told him how much his mother had loved him and talked about him continually. The old man said “Did you know that your Mother kept your room for you all these years?” The boy did not know that. “She changed the sheets, fresh and white every single day just in case you decided to come home.” Warren wrote in his wise, wonderful way that it is a wonderful thing to have a place to come home to.

As I think of these early forty days that lead up to Easter, I think of homecoming. A place to come home to. At the end of the road there is a light in the window and someone who waits. There are clean, white sheets just for the likes of us. Let us leave it all behind, the broken promises, the shattered dreams, the fears and rage of so much. A world that some days seems like an insane asylum. Let’s begin again that long journey. At Lent I remember we have a place to come to. Thanks be to God.

(I took the above photograph at the Louisville (Ky.) Speed Museum. I  do not know the name of the sculptor--but this life-size piece of the Prodigal is moving and beautiful.)