One Way Love: Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World Read Free Page A

continue living this way, you can’t do so under our roof.”
    After they kicked me out, I dropped out of high school. I thought it was the best thing that had ever happened to me, and it may have been—but not for the reasons I surmised. Those first two years, I floated from one friend’s house to another’s, doing odd jobs, just barely making ends meet, pursuing freedom with every ounce of my being, somehow convinced that without parents and teachers looking over my shoulder, all my problems would be solved. They weren’t. The opposite, in fact. When I turned eighteen, I was finally able to get an apartment of my own, which turned up the volume considerably on my South Florida–style debauchery. I would get a job, do something stupid, get fired. My parents would bail me out, and then I’d go out and do it again. I put them through hell! I wasn’t happy, not at all, but I did learn quite a bit about myself, my family, and, ultimately, about God. In fact, it was the beginning of my personal crash course in one-way love.
    A TALE OF TWO SONS
    The Bible is positively saturated with the message of one-way love, a number of instances of which I will be unpacking in these pages. We’ll read in bewilderment as Christ comforts a broken-down prostitute. We’ll see him excoriate those oh-so-punctilious keepers of the salt mines, the Pharisees, who would bar the weak, weary, and wounded from their personal spiritual bank account. We’ll hear him speak his Father’s words of mercy as he answers the humble whispers of a traitorous loan shark. We’ll squirm as he probes our sense of right and wrong, our love of conditionality, with questions like, “Do you resent my generosity?” Then we’ll see him purposely subvert the rules so that we might learn that mercy trumps them all. In fact, before we continue, let’s take a step back and look at what may be the most famous picture of one-way love in the Bible—the parable that hits extremely close to home for me, the parable of the two sons, traditionally called the parable of the prodigal son.
    And [Jesus] said, “There was a man who had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of property that is coming to me.’ And he divided his property between them. Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and took a journey into a far country, and there he squandered his property in reckless living. And when he had spent everything, a severe famine arose in that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed pigs. And he was longing to be fed with the pods that the pigs ate, and no one gave him anything. But when he came to himself, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have more than enough bread, but I perish here with hunger!’” (Luke 15:11–17)
    The prodigal son may have left his home voluntarily, but I’m not so sure he and I are all that different. I made it very clear to everyone around me that I couldn’t wait to get out on my own and live the life. The prodigal son is more direct. He goes to his father and says, “I want my share of the inheritance right now.” In those days, a son did not get his share of the inheritance until his father died, so he was essentially saying, “Dad, as far as I’m concerned, you’re dead to me, and since you won’t oblige and kick off, just give me my share of the inheritance now.” Unloving, entitled, disrespectful, and rude. Sound familiar?
    I know what my dad would have said, and as a father, I know what I would say if one of my sons asked me to give him his inheritance. This father knows how reckless and self-destructive his son is being, and he knows his son is going to squander whatever he gives him. So what does he do? He turns everything we think we know about raising responsible children on its head and gives the boy what he asks. We read that and think,