Coming to Yourself

Last night I asked you to write down how you actually left. Three or four sentences, no confession, just accuracy. If you did it, keep it close. We’re going to need it.

If you didn’t, that’s fine too. You’ll do it when you’re ready, or you won’t, and either way you’re still reading, which is more than most people manage.

Now let me tell you what happens next in the story, because it is not what you were taught.

Here’s the sequence, and the order is the whole point.

After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need.

Read that again.

He spent everything. Then the famine came. Two separate events, and Luke puts them in that order deliberately.

The boy wrecked his own money. That was him. Nobody made him do it and the text doesn’t let him off. But the famine was weather. The famine hit every person in that country, the careful ones and the careless ones alike, and it would have hit him if he’d been the most responsible young man in the province.

So what actually put him in the pig field was a combination. Some of it he did. Some of it happened to him. And by the time he was down there, he could not tell you which was which, and neither can you.

That’s the first honest thing in this chapter, and I want to give it to you before anything else.

Some of what wrecked your life was your fault, and some of it was weather, and you have been paying the full bill for both.

The divorce and the layoff. The drinking and the diagnosis. The choices and the crash of ’08. The affair and the death that happened eight months before it. You’ve been carrying all of it under one heading, and the heading says me.

I’m not letting you off the first column. There is a first column. We’re going to spend a lot of this book in it and I’m not going to pretend it isn’t there.

But you have been billed twice, and one of those bills isn’t yours.

Watch what he does next, because everybody skips it.

So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs.

He got a job.

He didn’t lie down. He didn’t wait for rescue. And the Greek is rougher than the English lets on. The word is closer to glued himself than hired on, and the people who read it closely think it means he attached himself to a man who did not want him and would not shake him off. He begged his way into the worst work available to a Jewish man in the ancient world, and then he did it.

I want you to sit with that for a second, because the version of this story you got in a Sunday school room probably had him lying in the mud feeling sorry for himself, and that is not what the text says. The text says he went to work. He was trying. He was doing the only thing left to do and he was doing it in a pig field.

That’s most of the people I’ve known in this position. Not lying down. Working. Grinding through years of a life they didn’t plan, doing whatever was in front of them, and getting quietly poorer the whole time.

And then comes the loneliest sentence in the entire parable.

He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything.

No one gave him anything.

The tense of it is the part that gets me. It isn’t that nobody gave him anything once. It’s that nobody was giving him anything, day after day, for as long as it went on. He was standing in a field in a foreign country, working a job, starving, and not one person in that country ever changed their mind about him.

If you have been out here a while, you know that sentence from the inside. It usually isn’t cruelty either. It’s that when your life comes apart slowly enough, people stop seeing you as somebody in trouble and start seeing you as somebody who is simply like that now. And once that happens nobody has to decide anything. It just becomes how it is.

And then the turn.

When he came to his senses, he said, “How many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death!”

Some translations say when he came to himself. I like that one better. It suggests he’d been somewhere else, somewhere outside his own thinking, and he walked back into it.

Now look very carefully at what the turn actually consists of.

It’s arithmetic.

He compares two numbers. Hired hands at my father’s place: eating. Me: starving. That’s it. That’s the moment. There is no lightning, no weeping, no crisis of the soul recorded anywhere in that verse. A man in a field runs a comparison and the comparison comes out obvious.

The turn, as Luke records it, is not a feeling. It’s a comparison.

I need you to hear that, because I think it is the single most useful thing in this chapter for somebody in your position.

You have been waiting to feel something.

You’ve been waiting for the moment when it hits you, when you’re broken enough or sorry enough or moved enough, when something finally cracks open in you and you know. You’ve assumed that’s how this works, because that’s what you saw. You watched people go down front crying. You watched revivals. If you grew up like I did, you watched a room full of people have an experience and you understood that the experience is the thing.

That feeling may not be coming.

And it doesn’t need to. This boy did not feel his way home. He thought his way home, in a field, on an empty stomach, with a completely clear head, and the whole rest of the story runs off that one calculation.

If you’re waiting to be overcome before you’ll take a step, you may wait the rest of your life. Clear thinking counts. It counted for him.

There’s one more thing here and it’s the part that gets misread the most.

His arithmetic was correct about the facts and completely wrong about the conclusion.

The numbers were right. His father’s hired hands really did have food. He really was starving. The comparison was accurate and it pointed the right direction, which was home.

But he then took that accurate comparison and drew a conclusion from it that was flat wrong, and he built a whole plan on the wrong part. He decided that since the hired hands were eating, the thing to become was a hired hand.

Hold that. We’re going to spend the entire next chapter on it, because that conclusion is the exact one you’ve drawn, and it’s the one that costs the most.

For now, just notice this: the same clear head that got him pointed home also produced the worst idea in the story. Accuracy about your situation does not automatically produce accuracy about your worth. They’re two different measurements and most people run the first one and then guess at the second.

Here’s your move, and like the last one it’s small.

Take two sheets of paper, or draw a line down the middle of one.

On the left, write what you did. The actual things. Not adjectives about yourself, not I was selfish or I was a mess. Verbs. What you did, to whom, roughly when.

On the right, write what happened to you. The things that would have happened regardless of the kind of person you were. The economy. The illness. The death. What somebody else did that you had no vote on. The thing that was done to you when you were too young to have a say.

Take your time on the right column. It’ll be shorter than it should be, because you’ve spent years moving things from the right column to the left one. That’s what people do. It feels more honest and it feels more in control, because a world where everything is your fault is at least a world you’re steering.

You’re not steering. Some of it was weather.

Don’t resolve anything. Don’t forgive anybody, including yourself. That’s not tonight’s work and I’d be lying if I told you a list fixes it.

Just get the two columns separated, and notice how long you’ve been paying on the wrong one.

Then, if you can, do what the boy did in the field. Run one honest comparison. Not about what you deserve. Just about where you are, and whether staying here is working.

Here I am starving to death.

The repenting comes in the next verse. This one is a man doing math.

It was enough to get him on the road.