When the Prodigal is Your Child
I watched the movie Unstoppable last night. The story is inspiring and challenging, and it lets me know there are many people who are going through family problems. Perhaps you are going through some challenges with your children or your parents. Here are two stories from other unknown parents, just like you, who persevered and grew through a family challenge. Remember, mountaintops inspire people, and valleys mature them.
Someone wrote this story to offer hope to those parents struggling through their children’s teenage years. It’s called “The Cat Years.” It’s true most of the time. This story has appeared in my articles several times, but not in the last seven years.
“I just realized that while children are loyal and affectionate dogs, teenagers are cats. Being a dog owner is easier than being a cat owner. You feed it and train it. It puts its head on your knees and gazes at you as if you were a Rembrandt painting. It bounds indoors with enthusiasm when you call it.
Then, around age 13, your adorable little puppy turns into a big old cat. When you tell it to come inside, it looks amazed, as if wondering who died and made you emperor. Instead of dogging your footsteps, it disappears. You won’t see it again until it gets hungry – then it pauses on its sprint through the kitchen to turn its nose up at whatever you’re serving.
When you reach out to ruffle its head, it twists away from you, then gives you a blank stare as if trying to remember where it has seen you before. You, not realizing that the dog is now a cat, think something must be desperately wrong with it. Your cat appears to be antisocial, distant, and depressed. It won’t go on family outings.
Since you’re the one who raised it and taught it to fetch, stay, and sit on command, you assume that you must have done something wrong. Flooded with guilt and fear, you redouble your efforts to make your pet behave. Only now are you dealing with a cat, so everything that worked before now produces the opposite of the desired result. Call it, and it runs away. Tell it to sit, and it jumps on the counter.
Instead of continuing to act like a dog owner, you must learn to behave like a cat owner. Sit still, and it will come, seeking the warm, comfortable lap it has not entirely forgotten. Be there to open the door for it. Then, one day, your grown-up child walks into the kitchen, kisses you, and says, “You’ve been on your feet all day. Let me get those dishes for you.” Then you realize your cat is a dog again.”
Here is the second story about when your child is the prodigal. This is real life for many parents and children. I this case the parent is a pastor.
“Many of you may have heard the Bible verse that says, ‘Train up a child in the way they should go, and when they are old, they will not depart from it’ (Proverbs 22:6). However, my daughter had departed. And I was about to learn why that verse wasn't a guarantee – it was a strategy.
We did everything "right." We had family devotions, a Christian school, a youth group that met three times a week, no phones until age 16, no dating, and no worldly music. I had built a fortress of rules, thinking I was building a foundation of faith. Then came the note: "Dad, I can't breathe in your perfect Christian world anymore."
Nine months. That's how long she was gone – 270 days of her empty bed mocking my ministry. Every Sunday, I'd preach about God's sovereignty while my gut churned with fear. To be honest with you, I was calling out to her every altar call I gave. “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his soul?" (Mark 8:36). Or his daughter's?
The turning point came at 3:00 AM, three months after her leaving. I was reading Luke, Chapter 15, for the thousandth time, but suddenly saw something I'd missed in twenty years of preaching about the prodigal son. The father let him go. The father didn't chase his son. He didn't send search parties. The father didn't try to control.
The Bible says in Luke, "And the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country..." (Luke 15:13). That night, my prayer journal entry read, "Lord, I'd rather lose my ministry than my daughter. Show me how to die to my right to control." I stopped fighting my daughter and started fighting for her. Not with rules but with prayer. Not with demands but with dying to myself. Not with perfect parenting but with me transparently wrestling before God for my daughter.
She came home last month, not because I fought harder, but because I finally learned to fight differently. She found me wrestling in prayer like Jacob at Peniel in my study. Not the perfect father she'd run from, but a broken man clinging to God’s grace. "Dad," she said, "I needed to see you struggle, too." Parents, our children don't need our perfect parenting. The prodigal son returned to a father who had already died to his right to control. That's the battle most of us won't fight.
"But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran to the prodigal..." (Luke 15:20). The father ran because he had already surrendered. Perhaps that's what Apostle Paul meant when he said, “For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
Parents, sometimes we need to relinquish our need to control and surrender to God, who is in control.
Ed Delph/March 24, 2025/CCC