“When he finally came to his senses, he said to himself, “At home even the hired servants have food to spare, and here I am dying of hunger. I will go home to my father.” —Luke 15:17
When the wandering son finally comes to his senses, he decides to reshape his narrative. I once was blind, but now I see. Our blindness births an unexpected the blessing. For the prodigal son, in order for him to regain his sight, he has to leave and land in circumstances that lack in every good thing so that he can see the goodness that his father offers.
The reshaping of our narrative is accomplished similarly to the working of clay. To form a new narrative involves the smashing of the old one. Breaking the old clay to find blessing in the new one. But the breaking process involves pain. Sometimes, we hold on to the old narrative because we wanted it to work. To make sense, and to be meaningful in our life. But we hang on to a narrative that has moved on without us. The prodigal son is left in the pig pen wondering why he’s there when the narrative he hoped for has already passed him up. The fulfillment is gone. All that’s left is a figment, a fantasy of the life he wanted that could never truly be his.
Sometimes, we come up with the wrong narrative for our life. Other times, we allow others to jot the wrong narrative for us. Either way, to form a new narrative will hurt. It will leave scars…..because a trauma of truth tends to bleed. But there is a third narrative, one written by God whose words trump all the words that came before. Be careful which narrative is chosen. You don’t want to live a life where you believed you weren’t enough, couldn’t fulfill, and didn’t meet the demands of what the narrative of your past needed.
The prodigal son’s breaking of clay begins “when he finally comes to his senses.” The breaking of clay is the breaking of the old narrative of the flesh for a narrative of the spirit. The prodigal son has experienced personal failure in his narrative where he breaks his father’s heart and breaks away from the family. Now, finally. It’s time for the son to break. Crush the narrative of prodigal to purposeful. It’s time to go home to the father and find a new purpose. Broken, but blessed. No longer blind, but believing.
©️2020 Jordan Su