Guess You Had To Be There...

The Prodigal Son is the story of the beginning of wisdom. Every person goes through their own prodigal journey. Its a growing experience. Without it, we never will learn the important lessons of life.

For those of you who are new to the Bible, let me recap: A young man comes to his father and tells him that he wants to go see the world. The father gives the young man his share of the inheritance and sends him off. The young man travels the world. He sees amazing things, does amazing things, and generally sows his oats - so to speak. But then, he runs out of cash. He finds himself slopping the pigs for some farmer in a foreign nation just to survive. Then he realizes that even as a slave for his father, he would be treated with more respect - so he returns home. When his father sees his son return, he is so overjoyed that he calls for a great feast and restores his son to his former glory as his son (though one suspects the trips to Vegas aren't included in the new deal ;) In a nutshell, that's the story.

I just finished watching a movie called Jarhead. I can't recommend the movie, but to a very few people, but I think it perfectly captures the particular experience of youth finding their own way in the world. There's a scene near the end of the movie where the young Private, played by Jake Gylenhall, is in the middle of the Iraqi desert with his Staff Sergeant, played by Jamie Foxx. All around them it is artifical night as the oil wells burn and black clouds cover the landscape - illuminating the desert with their fiery glow. They are standing in a bomb crater. A completely fire gutted car sits silently at one end of the crater. The Staff Sergeant looks at his Private and says, "You know why I like this job?" "No, Staff Sergeant." "Because of this... where else are you going to see something like this?" It is a painfully ironic moment - and the beginning of wisdom.

Where else are you going to witness the fiery hell of war? Where else are you going to find yourself upside down and someone sliding an entire beer down a tube into your head? Where else are you going to go skinny dipping under a waterfall? Where else are you going to want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane? Where else are we going to stay up all night talking to someone we can't wait to know better? Youth. Prodigal youth. The beginnings of wisdom.

Until you live life, you can't begin to understand it.