The Pattern of Leaving and Coming Home
The prodigal son story is not really about sin. It is about a psychological journey every person makes at least once.
We call this the story of the prodigal son. But that framing focuses on the failure. Read it again and you will see it is actually a story about a journey — one that has three distinct movements: leaving, being lost, and returning.
“Jesus continued: 'There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, Father, give me my share of the estate. So he divided his property between them. Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living.'”
The younger son does not leave because he is bad. He leaves because he has not yet become himself. That is not rebellion — it is development.
Psychologists call this individuation — the process by which a person separates from the identity given to them by their family or community and discovers who they actually are. It often looks like rejection. But it is more accurately a necessary departure.
The son needs to leave not because the father is wrong, but because he has not yet tested himself against reality. He wants to know if he can stand on his own.
He cannot. He loses everything. And it is in the losing that something shifts.
When he came to himself — the text says it this way — he remembered who he was and where he came from. The loss was not the end of his story. It was the condition that made return possible.
You cannot return to a place you have never left.
“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.”
The father sees him while he is still a long way off. This means the father was watching the road. He had been watching the whole time.
The return is not to the same place he left. It is to the same place, but seen differently. He is the same son. But he is no longer the son who took his inheritance and left. He is the son who came back.
The father does not restore the old relationship. He inaugurates a new one — with a robe, a ring, a feast. These are not just gifts. They are declarations of identity.
You are still my son. That has not changed. But everything else has.
Judea — the world Jesus taught in and the culture that understood the weight of inheritance and return
Jerusalem · Jerusalem, Israel
Where in your life have you left something — a belief, a relationship, an identity — and not yet returned? What would it mean to come home to it, changed?
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