Transformation thru Journey, episode 139

0:00 If you love a prodigal, you can discover help and hope for your wilderness journey right here at When You Love a Prodigal, and also help and hope for your own life journey. I imagine that our conversation last week with Pat and Tammy McLeod brought out many emotions for you – heartbreak, sorrow, new understanding, and hopefully encouraged you in how to live and love like Jesus with your prodigal. Today, you get to hear a message from me. Several years ago, I was asked to speak at a Christian Leadership Alliance gathering on transformation through a prodigal wilderness.

0:48 It was recorded. In it, I share some of our story with our prodigal, how I learned to live with our prodigal with love and mercy and grace, and I discovered amazing gifts that God had for me in the wilderness on that journey. May this encourage you. Greetings! I'm so glad that you're here, and I am excited to share with you some things I learned on about a 15-year journey with our prodigal son. I call this Transformational Treasures from the prodigal wilderness. I don't know why you're here, but I assume there's someone that you care about who's perhaps wandered away or is making some bad choices or is making really destructive choices.

1:42 I hope I can give you some hope as well as some help as you are on that journey. My name is Judy Douglas. My husband, Steve, and I have had the great privilege to be on staff with crew, Campus Crusade for Christ, for more than 50 years, and for almost 20 years now, we've been leading the ministry around the world. And one of the things that has done amazing transformation in us is our prodigal journey with our son. It's been hard, hard, hard, and oh, so wonderful to see what God has done in a lot of lives as a result of that.

2:24 So what I want to do first is tell you very briefly how we got in this place. We had these two wonderful daughters, and we're loving doing our ministry, and just happy with where we were in our lives. And God said to me one day, I'm going to send you a son. And I said, no, thank you. And he says, oh, no, I'm going to send you a son and he will be a gift. I said, okay, years pass, nothing happened. We had just moved to Florida from our former headquarters in California. And God said, when you get to Florida, I'm going to send you that son.

3:11 And sure enough, a few weeks after we arrived, a new friend said, do you know someone who could take an eight-year-old boy? And I went, oh, dear. And God whispered, this is my gift for you. And I said, we might be able to do that. It took almost a year. He'd been taken from his mother for neglect and could have been for many other things. She's a drug addict, alcoholic, made her income typically like that would be happening. And he was living with her and it was a dangerous place. There were men in and out, there were drug deals going down.

3:55 He saw someone get stabbed, those kind of things. He didn't know where the next meal was coming from. And his mom would just disappear. And the neighbors would have to call the grandparents who had set them up in this little bitty trailer. And it was a scary place that he spent the first eight years of his life. By the time he came into our home, he was nine, almost 10, going into third grade, could barely read or write, and had so many issues from his mother's drugs and alcohol while she was carrying him. Things that are normal ADD because of ADHD because of that. Also, did you know that fetal alcohol syndrome causes in the fetus or actually prevents in the fetus, the formation of the physical means for cause and effect reasoning.

4:51 Just think of that. No ability to understand if you do this, this happens. And he had a RAD, reactive attachment disorder. His dad had never been there. His mother chose her addictions. Even his grandparents whom he adored would not take him because they said we're already raising his half sister. We're too old and too tired to take him too. And that's how God sent him to us. Now, he came to us as a foster child. And for three years, it was challenging because he had lots of issues. We had to get tutoring for him. We did a lot of different things to try and help him be able to cope with life and also to help us be able to cope with him.

5:38 He wasn't bad. He wasn't doing terrible things, but he was challenging to work with. He would hoard, for example, food because he wasn't used to having enough food all the time. Did you know that kids in poverty, their greatest source of vegetables is from ketchup packets? And sure enough, one night I found in his drawer a whole bunch of ketchup packets because that's one of the things that he could count on for food, just go into any fast food place and get it. It was challenging. He didn't understand that you go to bed at a certain time and get up and actually go to school every day.

6:19 He was shocked that there were things he couldn't watch on TV and astounded that we all sat down at a table to eat dinner together. And so those were all new for him and for us understanding a child coming out of such a hard circumstance. So it was challenging. After three years, they terminated his mother's rights and he was up for adoption and they said, you have first choice. So we went, hmm, I was pretty sure that God didn't say I'm sending you a son for three years, but my husband had a lot of reservations because even though we cared for this boy, he was such a distraction to all that we were doing to our daughters and to my husband and especially his leadership in the ministry.

7:05 But to me as well, because I'm the one who gave him most of the time that he required just to survive. But we sat down with our daughters and we talked and prayed and decided, yes, God would have us adopt him. So we did and we thought he will now believe that we're not going to also abandon him, that we are serious when we say we care about him, that we love him and we want him in our family. And so maybe he'll settle down some except that he went into middle school. Now, you know, sixth grade boys are about this tall, right? Well, our Josh was by this time almost 13 and had muscles and was taller than most of it, even the kids his age.

7:55 And so he found out that size means you can be a bully. You can get money from the little kids. You can get other things you might want from them as well. And it was hard. And he couldn't stay still or be quiet in class. So they sent him most of the time to alternative classroom. It was hard. It was hard. And we ended up when they threatened to kick him out of school, putting him in a Christian residential program here in Orlando that we kind of had to go through as well. And it was a good thing because there he had a lot of structure.

8:35 There were a hundred thousands maybe rules, so he began to learn better. Cause and effect reasoning because every time you broke a rule, the consequences got enforced. And he met Jesus there too. And that was a wonderful thing. And when he came out of the program and came home, he said, All right, I really want my life to be different. I want to walk with God. And I home-schooled him to catch him up to grade level. And then he begged and begged to go to school. And I'm like, I don't know. But finally, we agreed with lots of parameters and expectations. And it took him about three weeks, three weeks to find all his old friends, the gang members and other friends.

9:19 And he gravitated to other kids who were struggling, making bad choices. And so we entered into a long, long journey of ups and downs, a little up here and there with the Lord, and then a long time making destructive choices and that kind of thing year after year. Our lives over those next years included. Lots of cars, learning how to get out of traffic tickets, juvenile justice court, time in juvenile detention, adult justice court, a little time in prison, two years on probation, which was a gift from God.

10:02 He was better. But it was just one thing after another. Girls, drugs, alcohol, stealing, he lied about everything. Deception was the norm. And it was a hard thing, really hard. And we became desperate because everything we had tried hadn't really helped. Even his occasionally wanting to walk with God was always short lived. And so we're ending up not just praying, but on our faces asking the Lord. And then we asked others to join with us. And that became the prayer for protocols community that we have.

10:43 And so that is kind of the story. It went on until he was about, well, it began to calm down when he was about 28. So it was about 15 years of really hard journey and a scary time. But God was in it the whole time. And oh, my goodness, the things that I learned. So I'm going to share two major topics with you as quickly as I can. And it'll tell you that if you really want to know more, I have this book called When You Love a Protocol. It's 90 Days of Grace for the Wilderness. Over those years, I wrote letters to the prayer for protocols community.

11:24 And they turned into this devotional. And so there's more in depth through this. First thing I want to talk about is some lessons I learned about what actually will help to bring the loved one back. A lot of times we're told that you should have tough love. And I'm going to explain what you should have. But tough love just says resistance, push away, and they feel rejected. And so it often stops the thing that's most important. And that is maintaining relationship. Doesn't mean it's always a good and easy relationship.

12:06 But you don't let their angry words be met with your angry words or their wrong behavior be met with such things that push them out. And that we act more like the father in the Protocol's son story, who let his son go. But when he's watching for him and he sees him coming, he just picks his robes up and runs to greet him. And his son's trying to say, I'm sorry, I apologize. Just let me be a servant. The father says, oh, my son who was lost is found. And he's back here. Put my robe on, take my sandals, let's have a party.

12:47 And that's how God feels about us. Every time we wander in any way and we come back, God's saying, I'm so excited that you're back. And it's how he feels about our loved ones as well. And so let me just quickly go over several things there and then get into what is the most exciting part. First of all, you do need boundaries. I just would not call them tough love. You need to have understanding of what's acceptable in your family to respect for each other and how we treat people and our family and how we take care of our home and how we represent when we're out in the community. And those kind of, and then as they get older and they would like to come back and live because they were out of a job, then can they come back?

13:37 Well, we let Josh come back several times. But there were always some understanding. These are the boundaries for living in our home. This is acceptable and expected. This is not acceptable and won't be allowed. And then when he broke them repeatedly and we said, well, looks like you're choosing to move out. He says, you're kicking me out. No, no. We are glad for you to be here. But you can't seem to be able to live by our greed upon boundaries and the consequence that we agreed on was that you would not stay there. And so that's an important part. But even more important than understanding that we have the boundaries and the consequences clearly defined.

14:23 So it's not a surprise that, sorry, this is happening to you. But it's the way we do it. And I'm just going to mention three ways that we do it. And the first is with love. Our God lavishes love on us always and forever. Says, the Lord appeared to us, Jeremiah tells us in the past, saying, I have loved you with an everlasting love. I have drawn you with loving kindness. And God calls on us to do that. And we'll talk more about that later. But he says, when God put his love on the line, this is from the message for us by offering his son in sacrificial death until death while we were of no use for him whatsoever.

15:14 Now, there are plenty of times when our prodigal hours and perhaps yours will do and say things. It's like, you just don't even want to see him right now. But God says, even when you were like that, doing the worst, not doing anything I wanted, you come. And I'm going to give you the love that I have for you. He tells us this amazing thing. He says, you are able to love with my love because I have loved you and poured my love into you. He told me that one night when I was having a really hard time with Josh. And he says, Judy, let me show you. I've given you my love for this boy.

15:57 I told you I was sending him to you. And I have given you my love. And therefore, you have it for this boy. Wow, it worked. It helped. It wasn't always perfect for me. But I mean, I wasn't. It received me. He will enable us to love even when they say they're famous. I hate you, which they do often. Or just do the things that are disrespectful. And a second thing to give is mercy. Our God loves mercy. His faithful love of the Lord never ends. His mercies never cease. Great is his faithfulness.

16:38 His mercies begin afresh every morning. He tells us that mercy triumphs over judgment. He says, how much have I forgiven you? Yeah, a lot. He says, think you can forgive them? Yeah, they're going to do things that need forgiveness. But can you forgive? Even though there might be consequences, you can still forgive. If you're keeping on a track of them all, then that's not probably forgiven. Steve would say he would get so frustrated with Josh sometimes in the ways that the things that Josh would do are the way he spoke to me sometimes.

17:22 And Steve would just, especially when he wouldn't work, Josh, Steve called him the most creative work of order he'd ever seen. And he just avoided work. We watched him watch his friends fix his car. He didn't raise a hand to help. And that just really bothered Steve. And every time Steve would start thinking, you're just a no good nothing. And the Lord would say, Steve. And he was, oh, Lord. So he says, as much as there might be this much difference between me and Josh, she said, the gap between me and the Lord is so much greater. And God has forgiven me.

18:03 How can I not give mercy to this boy, our son? And then Grace. As we live in his grace, we are rescued by his mercy. As we live in his love and are rescued by his mercy, then he will give us the grace to us to do it and then to extend it to our loved ones. What is that? It's basically an undeserved gift from God. It's what God wants to give us plus even more than he could give us that he has to, in a sense. He is able to make all grace abound to you so that in all things at all time, having all that you need, you will abound at every good work.

18:51 He says, give grace. So one of the things God said to me early in this journey was, when you make mistakes with this boy, and you will, and I did, he says, make them on the side of grace. And that's not always easy. And it's also not acceptable to some people. They tell me I'm wrong. But I want to read just a little bit from our chapter on grace in this book. It's called The Voice of Grace because the way we most often are ungracious to those we love is by our mouths, by the way we speak to them.

19:35 And so I just want to read you a few things here. That's disgraceful. You are so ungrateful. Those phrases contain a word with the Latin root, root for grace, or lack of it in this case. They mean without grace. And they are words that any of us might have said to our prodigals because they would have been true. But God tells us, your lips have been anointed with grace since God has blessed you forever. He says, let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt so that you may know how to answer everyone.

20:23 I'm going to give you just a real quick little way to watch the voice that you use with your left way. Practical approaches. Wait. Count to 10 or 20 or whatever you need before you speak. Moderate. Speak slowly, calmly, gently, and firmly. Think. Will these words add fuel to the fire? Consider. Would you like someone to speak such words to you in that tone of voice? Recognize. This is really important.

21:04 The words you speak today may be part of your relationship with your prodigal for all the years to come. It sticks in their minds. Realize your tone of voice can turn neutral words into destructive words. And remember, remember this. You love this person. Most of all, pray. Stop before you speak and talk to the Lord. So good boundaries and defined consequences. Love, mercy, and grace. So what's in it for you?

21:45 Did you know there are amazing gifts? Now, probably when you're looking for gifts, you don't go out in the wilderness and pick up something. You might get a snake or one of those lizards that has poisonous or something like that around where I live in Florida. But God has gifts for us. In the wilderness. And I'm just going to name four of them. But they're good gifts. First John 3.18 says, dear children, let us love with words or speech. But let us not love with words or speech, but with actions and in truth.

22:30 And he reminds us again, he gave us love when we didn't deserve it. There's a whole chapter on love in my book. One section of it talks about the things that love does. Love speaks truth. It's all about truth. Love gives mercy. Love gives grace. We've talked about those things. Love gives honor. It's all too often that the words we use with our protocols aren't honoring. We love to or at least we find ourselves pointing out everything they did wrong and how they're not making a good life for themselves.

23:14 And that may be true. But it also we need to learn to honor them. One of the things my sons said, you need to be firm with your protocol, but you also need to affirm them in any way you possibly can. But here's one that I love. This is where to bless them. And sometimes there's nothing in you that wants to give blessing to that person who's caused a lot of pain. One day when Josh had done something really that made me more than annoyed, he was gone. And I said, all right, Lord, I'm going to bless him.

23:55 Now, one of the chores my kids had was to do their own laundry. So I went up to Josh's room, found as many of his dirty clothes as I could, and took them down to wash them for him. And as I put every piece of laundry into the washing machine, I said, I bless you, Josh. I bless you, Josh. I bless you, Josh. Now, I don't know that he felt blessed by any of that, but he was because God took my word for it to bless him. And it changed me a whole lot to be able to turn my anger into blessing toward my son.

24:41 This was an incredibly important lesson I learned. One of the things that happened along the way was that I fell in love with this boy. I really went from being a good mom taking care of the kid, God had trusted us, to being in love with my son. I remember the day he was born in my heart as my son. And I really cared for him. And I kept saying, Lord, maybe he could at least sign a card for my birthday or Mother's Day. Love, Josh. No, he couldn't do that because to him, to love me was a betrayal of his birth mom. And he just couldn't do it. She was his mother, and he loved her.

25:22 And so that was understandable. And I said, can't that change? God didn't exactly answer that. But he did say, Judy, don't you understand? Unconditional love requires nothing in return, including love. He said, unconditional love, the kind of love I've shared with you to give to this boy, doesn't need love in return. He'll probably love you. But that's not the part. That's not. Unconditional love has no conditions. Another thing I learned was a lot more about grace and understanding, believing in somebody, giving them grace to fail and not get after them or put them down, giving them opportunities to prove they're wanting to make better choices.

26:20 Sometimes it comes right back in your face. But God says he gives it to us all the time. How often has he given you grace when you didn't do what you said or when you did something hurtful? He gives grace, and he asks us to. This one's one of my favorites. Those are gifts. So he gave me an understanding of unconditional love. He gave me the realization that grace is abundant and more than enough. And then this is one of my favorites. He says he's always at work. You see, the most common question you hear from people who love a prodigal is, how long, Lord?

27:04 How long is this going to go on? For me, the hard part was 15 years. The challenges were beyond that. But the 15 years were really hard, full of really sad things. Some 138A, the Lord will vindicate me. Your love, Lord, endures forever. Do not abandon the work of your hands. You're doing this work. Don't give up. And he says, yes, what I'm saying to you, don't give up. Your love is going to keep the work happening in this person. Philippians 1.6, love this verse.

27:47 Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you, or in our case in Josh, oh yeah, in me too, will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. And so when I would get at a place where I'm like, help. I'm in a fog. I can't see anything. Or I'm about to fall down this cliff. I'm out of control. I don't know what to do for this boy. And God said, I'm at work. I'm working. Even if you can't see a thing I'm doing right now, it's how we might feel those of us in this virus thing right now.

28:28 Time you see this, you might know. But we don't know right now. But God says, you don't know what's going to happen. And I'm more patient than you are. He says, but I am working in Josh's life. Now, Josh could still resist. But God's always reaching out with love and mercy and grace. Then there's prayer. You know, I'm in ministry. I've been in ministry all my adult life. We pray a lot in our ministry. We pray at the beginning of a meeting. And after a meeting, we have days of prayer. We have times of prayer.

29:08 We pray. We get together to pray. We pray. And then Josh came along. And I found out I hardly knew what prayer was. Prayer became for me like my breathing. I was constantly talking to the Lord about this boy. I was on my face. I mean, literally, I spent a lot of time on my face begging God to give me what I needed for this, but to be doing the work in him. And I'm going to read you this awesome verse that I love here. I think I put it here. Yes.

29:49 It's Isaiah 62. He says, I have posted Watchman on your walls, Jerusalem. They will never be silent day or night. You who call on the Lord, give yourselves no rest. So first of all, he says, don't rest in your praying. Pray always without ceasing, he tells us. And then he says this wonderful thing. He says, give him no rest. God invites us to give him no rest while we bring to him what we're asking, till he establishes, in this case, Jerusalem and makes her the praise of the earth, until he does the work that we're begging him for, pleading for, waiting for in this person we love.

30:37 He says, don't rest. Keep praying. And don't think you are bothering me. Give me no rest. Keep asking. Keep asking. And then the last thing I would mention is a final gift God gave me. And it's the gift of gratitude. He tells us in the verse, as you know, verse, you know, be thankful in all circumstances. For this is God's will for you who belong to Christ Jesus. Don't you think that can't mean what it says? Like, how can we be thankful in everything? There are so many hard things in this world.

31:19 There are things I weep over because of people I know. There are things I read about in other places that I'm just weep over what happens to people and what people do to each other. And the tears I wept over this boy just seemed endless. And God says, give thanks. And that's probably the most transforming thing he did in my life, which teach me to give thanks in all things. I find a lot of times as I start to pray about something, the first words out of my mouth now are, thank you, Lord. I think that wasn't what I was thinking I was going to say.

32:02 But it is because God's done a work in me to help me understand that gratitude is the best way to express my trust in him. I believe that he's God. I believe that he's good. I believe he cares about me and the ones that I love. And so it's a wonderful gift. Let me close with this story. So our son, Josh, for a long time did landscaping. And he was doing this huge heads with a chainsaw.

32:44 And behind it was a chain like fence. And so he's and the chainsaw hits the fence. And it kicks back the chainsaw hits Josh from here to here. And nice gash. And I get this call from his wife who says, Josh, Josh is on his way to the trauma ER. He just cut his head open with a chainsaw. And amazingly, the first words that came out of my mouth were, thank you, Lord. But then the cool thing is, other than that he really wasn't hurt that badly, it turned out.

33:28 It just chip to skull. Didn't break it. And stopped right above his eye. He can't lift his eyebrow. He has a Harry Potter scar, which is cool. And so I got in there to see him. I said, how are you? He says, well, it hurt a whole lot when they were cleaning it out. He said, but after I called 911, the next thing I did was say, thank you, Lord, because he'd been learning that. Just to close, Josh is 37 now. Maybe 38. I lose track. And he's on his second marriage.

34:08 He has a wife who had brought a daughter in and a four-year-old daughter. And he's about to have another little daughter next week. And so when you see this, he will have had that baby. They will have. And he's held the same job for five and a half years now. And when I watch him, and they live on a little farm, and they raise pigs and chickens, and he does farm work, goes to his all day labor job, comes home, does farm work. And because his wife has Lyme disease, he also fixes dinner and cleans up around the house. So he went from being the most creative work avoider I've ever seen to being one of the hardest working people I've ever seen.

34:53 And spiritually, he's still got growing to do, but then so do I. And he's turned into a good man, a responsible person, a great dad and husband. And I just cry when I see him now, not sad tears, but joyful tears, and what God has done. It was a long, hard journey. But I wouldn't trade it for anything, for his sake, as well as for mine. May God bless you with the gifts he wants to give you because of a person who's living with you or near you, who breaks your heart.

35:35 Just as we've broken God's heart. May God bless you through this person. Thank you. I hope you recognized, as you listened, all that we have been learning to live and love like Jesus can become realities for you as you walk with your prodigal. So let me ask you, what is one way you can grow in the way you speak to your loved one? Or to set boundaries with grace? Or to bless your wayward one? And what is one gift that you have received on this journey?

36:17 Be sure to check out the show notes, because there I give you some more links to other articles that you might gain some benefit from. Next week, I have another special guest for you. God bless you.