Still in the Distance

The son was still a long way down the road when his father saw him.

That’s how Luke tells it. But while he was still in the distance, his father saw him and was filled with compassion. The boy hadn’t reached the gate. He hadn’t said a word. He was a shape on the road, far enough off that most people wouldn’t have known who it was.

His father knew.

You don’t see someone in the distance unless you’re looking down that road.

The story starts with a man who had two sons, and the younger one wanted his share now. Father, give me my share of the estate. The text gives the father no speech in reply. No argument, no warning, no list of conditions. So he divided his property between them. A few days later the son packed everything and left for a distant country.

Then the father disappears from the story for seven verses.

Everything that happens next happens to the son, and it happens far away. The money runs out. A famine comes. He hires himself out to feed someone else’s pigs and gets hungry enough to want what the pigs are eating. But no one would give him a thing. Then, in the field, with the smell of it on him, he comes to his senses and starts rehearsing what he’ll say at home.

The father isn’t in any of that. He doesn’t show up in the far country. He doesn’t send a servant with money or a letter. Nobody goes to get the boy. Whatever the son decided in that field, he decided without his father standing over him.

That’s the part of the story that’s hardest to sit with if you love someone who’s gone. The father didn’t go and drag him home. The text never says whether he wanted to. It only tells us where he was when the son came back: home, and close enough to see the road.

The King James has the distance a little differently, and it’s the wording a lot of people grew up hearing: when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him. A great way off. Not at the door. Not halfway up the lane. Far enough that seeing him meant the father had been looking, and probably not for the first time. Luke never tells us how many evenings he’d stood there. It only says he saw.

Then he ran.

He ran to his son, embraced him, and kissed him. Before the speech. The son had it ready, and he started in on it. Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. He’d planned one more line, the one about being taken on as a hired hand. He never got to it. The father had already turned to the servants.

Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. A ring for his finger, sandals for his feet, the fattened calf. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again! He was lost and is found!

He didn’t answer the speech. He answered the son.

Look at what was already in the house. A robe good enough to be called the best. A ring. Sandals. A calf that had been fed up for a feast. The text doesn’t say who any of it was being kept for, and it would be too much to claim the father set it aside for this day. But when the day came, nobody had to go to market. Everything a homecoming needed was already there.

The son had walked all that way expecting less. He’d rehearsed a speech asking to be taken on as hired help, which tells you what he thought was waiting for him. What he found was a robe, a ring, and a father who was glad.

Rembrandt painted this scene near the end of his life, and the canvas hangs today in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. The son is on his knees with his head pressed against his father. The father has both hands on the boy’s back. You can’t see the son’s face, and you can’t see a speech. Off to the side stands a tall man watching, usually taken to be the older brother. He comes back at the end of this book.

So here is the one thing this book has to say, and it’s the only time it will say it.

You can’t bring them home. You can keep the light on.

The father couldn’t make his son want to come back. Nobody could. What he could do was stay where the boy could find him, keep looking down the road, and turn toward him the moment he appeared. The light left on isn’t a lecture taped to the window. It’s a place that’s still there and still warm, and a face that will turn toward them instead of away.

It isn’t doing nothing, either. The father looked, and when he saw, he ran. Staying put and staying ready turned out to be two different things, and he did both. He just didn’t do the one thing that wasn’t his to do, which was the deciding.

If you’re reading this, there’s probably someone you’re watching the road for.

A grown child who walked away from the faith you raised them in, or from the family, or who just stopped calling. A grandchild who thinks all of it is a joke. A husband or wife who stays home on Sunday while you go. A friend, a brother, someone you used to sit beside. You may have said the hard thing at the kitchen table, or said nothing at all for a long time. This book isn’t going to grade any of that. And the one you’re waiting for isn’t a problem to be solved in these pages. Nobody in here is.

This is the third time this series has walked into Luke 15. Bring the Baggage took the son, on the road home with his speech. Carried took the sheep and the coin, the ones who were found without doing the walking. This book takes the father. He’s the one standing where you stand.

A word about who’s talking, once.

I spent years on church staffs. I left a long time ago, and I’ve been the one outside ever since. I’m not writing as an expert on waiting, and I’m not further along than you are. These are people from Scripture who have been good company, and I think they’ll be good company for you.

Here’s how the book works.

Each chapter is one person who waited for someone. Jacob, who was told his son was dead and believed it for years. Jochebed, who sealed a basket and set her baby among the reeds. Hannah, who left her young son to serve at Shiloh and made him a little robe every year. Rizpah, who sat on a rock through a whole season. David, whose story with his son Absalom does not end well, and the book doesn’t pretend it does. Jairus, who stood on the road while help went to someone else first. Barnabas, who gave a young man a second chance when someone else wouldn’t. And Mary, who once went to bring her son home and at the end simply stood near him.

Each chapter tells what happened, plainly, and says one true thing near the end of the story. Then a short section called Where this meets your week, with a few ordinary situations where that life and yours overlap. Then one small thing to do, the smallest move the person in the story made, something you can do this week, alone, without anyone’s permission.

Every quotation is from the Berean Standard Bible, a modern translation anyone is free to use, checked word for word. Where the King James is used instead, the book says so. Where it reads between the lines, it says that too.

Tonight, turn on a real light.

The porch light, a lamp in the front window, the one over the kitchen sink. Turn it on and leave it on. It won’t bring anyone up the road. It isn’t supposed to. It’s for you to see, every time you pass it, that the place is still here and that you’re still looking.

Nobody else has to know why it’s on. Don’t post about it, and don’t mention it to the one you’re waiting for. If someone in the house asks, “I like it on” is a whole answer. Leave it on tomorrow night too, if you want. The point isn’t the bulb. The point is that you keep looking down the road, the way he did, without needing the road to answer back.

The father in the story never said a word about the waiting. All we’re told is what he did when it ended. While he was still in the distance, his father saw him.