SUNDAY, March 14 Lent 4

I've read or heard the parable of the prodigal son so many times and never applied it to girls. This meditation got me thinking about my own children; and, I realized that I had left my daughter outside in the cold.

I have just come to the churc after years of being lost. What a gift to have this as the store on my b-day

Years ago, I read a letter to Ann Landers from a woman who as a teenager had run away from home nad wound up in a distant city on the streets. Finally, she wrote, she had called her parents to ask whetehr she could come home, and they said, "We'll come and get you." Reading her letter, I thought of one of Robert Frost's best known lines" "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in"--but they don't HAVE to run to meet you with open arms.

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We, too, have had our own prodigal, and we experienced the second part of the story, not covered in this passage: the anger of the other sibling who resents the welcome the prodigal has received. It is a parent's love that looks beyond the child's behavior to the importance of the child's well-being and safety. Our response to the angry child? "You won't understand until you have children of your own."