What I Have Learned from Prodigals (episode 5)

0:00 Do you love a prodigal? Do you feel like you are lost in a scary and endless wilderness? Welcome to the When You Love a Prodigal podcast. I am Judy Douglass and I spent more than 15 years in that wilderness. I believe together we will discover help and hope for your journey. Welcome to episode 5 of the When You Love a Prodigal podcast. I am so excited that you are here today. We have gone over some of my story and our son Josh's story and a little bit of the hard wilderness years that we went through.

0:48 Last week we talked about what it really is to be a prodigal and what the definition is and how they get there. They don't just happen to be one. And so today I am so excited. My first interview we have one of my very favorite people in the whole world and that is Dan Wolgemuth. Dan is the president of Youth for Christ and my husband Steve and I have had the incredible privilege of meeting with a group of the leaders of student ministries across the U.S. and we spent more than 12 years meeting a couple of times a year with Dan and Mary.

1:30 Let me just say he is not only an amazing leader and very smart, he is also one of the most kind and gentle and encouraging and humble people I have ever met. I think he is great. But what makes him especially qualified to be on this podcast is that his ministry, Youth for Christ, now focuses on at-risk youth. And so he has learned a lot. That wasn't his story at all and he has learned a lot. And so we are going to just find out more about what that looks like.

2:11 So Dan, welcome. And would you give me, our listeners, a little bit of your backstory and Youth for Christ and how you ended up being president, second in the family? Yes, thank you Judy and thank you for the very, very kind introduction. The feelings are very mutual. We love you and Steve and we found ourselves drafting off of the two of you. You were in your role, my crew, before we stepped into this role in Youth for Christ. So isn't it a beautiful thing that we have in community, people that we can learn from and listen to, and then that becomes a reciprocal arrangement. We encourage each other. So we love that and we're so grateful for the privilege of walking into this journey together.

2:56 As you rightly noted, I grew up in a Christian home, spent 28 years post-college in a corporate career. I was on the national board of Youth for Christ. And as you said, I certainly had a heart for evangelism. I wanted young people to come to faith in Christ. I knew how pivotal those middle school, high school years were. But it was in 2005 that our national board, of which I was a part, asked me to change seats from a board member to the front of the room, to being the president and CEO. And I think it was grace and mercy of God that I didn't fully understand what that meant.

3:37 When Mary and I were initially married in 1978, Mary worked for Youth for Christ in our juvenile justice ministry. So I had had a few years of seeing the ministry in action, specifically with young people who had gotten into trouble legally. And so I witnessed it through the lens of my wife. But here I was now 49 years old being asked to move from Kansas City to Denver to lead the mission. And like many callings, you say yes before you have all the details. And it's a good thing because God really walked with us through that journey. So one more thing. Your dad was president before, many years before.

4:19 Exactly right. My dad was the fifth president of Youth for Christ from 1965 to 73, which coincides with my middle school and high school years. And so yes, I had Youth for Christ in my history and I loved it, but never thought vocationally it was where I would land. But loved that my dad blazed a trail and he had a reputation of being someone who prayed for the mission. And so drafted off of him back to our initial analogy. Well Youth for Christ as I was growing up in Young Life and then in Crew, all I knew was it was another wonderful ministry doing evangelism and discipleship.

5:00 And so as we got to know you and you started to talk about how you were moving beyond just one focus to making your major focus for the ministry to be at-risk kids. Could you tell us a little about that? Yeah, this is interesting space because much like the ministries you described, certainly Young Life and Crew and others that focus on middle school and high school students, we were walking the hallways of middle schools and high schools. We were connecting in cafeterias. We were going to football games. We were engaging with a group of young people. But what became obvious to us in the early 50s and then into the early 60s was that there was a population of young people that didn't typically fit into a local public school environment.

5:51 And so, you know, the spirit by virtue of that gravitational tug when the spirit pulls tugged us into the juvenile space where we're working with local court systems who really had no outside advocate to walk with a young person to journey as they're trying to process where they are in life. Sometimes there's a family involved, sometimes there's not. And so it was in the early 60s that we coined the phrase Youth Guidance, which was our brand for working with kids who were in some ways sideways with the legal system. And frankly, Judy, what happened from there was that the system itself pulled us in.

6:31 So court systems typically are so anxious for a positive influence that's not a family member in the life of a young person. And so it was a little like getting tugged into this. And not only did the church and Christian communities welcome us or applaud what we were doing, but the system itself tugged us in. So we have been in this space for a very, very long time. And frankly, we're the only national ministry of the ones that you just mentioned that that occupy this space specifically with young people in detention. I should expand that certainly as at risk kids are not just kids that are sentenced to some kind of juvenile term.

7:12 I mean, there are at risk kids walking the hallways of Cherokee Trail High School a mile from my house. And so even within our traditional campus ministry, the spirit has tugged us to those kids who are often overlooked or marginalized or silenced by virtue of not feeling like they fit in. Well, that speaks to my heart because at two places, Youth for Christ has intersected with our prodigal. First of all, which I talked about last week or the week before in my podcast, our son was at a program called House of Hope and his house dad was named Mike Young and Mike and Rose Young left there to join Youth for Christ.

7:59 And until recently, Mike has been leading the ministry of Youth for Christ nearby here. And he and our son have stayed close. He first was house dad to Josh. And then he was the one who led him to Jesus and baptized him and did early discipleship in his life. But then when he moved, he was still part of Josh's life. In fact, he helped with Josh's both of Josh's weddings. And I didn't pull that off. Sorry. And so that's been an important thing that that Mike was in his life, but Mike is still in his life.

8:42 And so he didn't just come in briefly for the time he was house dad, but he has continued to be a part of Josh's life. And we're so grateful for that. So talk to me a minute about these at risk kids. What are the common things or the things that would cause them to be labeled at risk and how did they get there? Yeah, so even as I listen to your story, Judy, and certainly know that story from the history that you and I have spent together, we often don't see the parental, the loving family side of the story. So we have loved Josh's story because not only have we engaged through Mike and Rose Young with Josh, but we've been able to see the impact that that's had on the Douglass family, which has been powerful for us.

9:35 You know, the reality is that in the 60s when youth guidance, which became juvenile justice ministry was being formed there, it was, it was to some extent easy to identify kids that were at risk. They were failing in school. They were getting in trouble by whether it was truancy or drugs or alcohol, something else. It was easy to point to a collection of young people and say, well, those, those young people for a variety of reasons, some based on a broken family environment or community where they have no support or a situation where they've gotten connected to a peer group that has tugged them in a direction that's destructive.

10:16 In the early sixties, it was easier to identify that group of young people. What it would tell you in 2021 is that virtually every young person by virtue of some of the social media influences and so on, every young person is at risk to some level or another. And so when you look at the fabric of a culture that is deteriorated, so you don't have some of the traditional family and foundational values that even amplifies or accelerates this brokenness and frankly, the breadth of at risk. Um, what, what I have come to realize, Judy, and, and even as I think about how I've learned from you in this process is that a prodigal, an at risk kids kid has a special place in the heart of Christ.

11:04 That this is, this is not just mobilizing a community of people who want to come alongside prodigals. This is aligning that mission with the heart of Christ, which is for prodigals. And I, I didn't know that in 2005, when we moved from Kansas city to Denver, that has been a journey for me to find myself realizing that to the extent I understand the journey of an at risk kid, a broken kid, a sinful kid, I understand the heart of Christ. And this is, you know, I think at times you look at this journey and think it's extra credit. Okay. If you do ministry at a local juvenile detention center, if you're walking with a pregnant 14 year old, if, if you're working with some other group of young people that might be self destructive, that's extra credit.

11:49 Jesus, Jesus gives us an extra note, but the fact is that connects as Matthew 25 tells us with the very heart of Christ. So this has been humbling in that reality because that's not, that was not my perspective. And guess what? Judy Douglass helped me understand that your journey was a light into that space for me, even as we spent time with you and Steve and unpacked some of your story and then looked at our youth for Christ story and where God was taking us. I love that. What you don't know is that in episode four, I have read the forward that you wrote for my book, which talks about that and talks about the fact that not only are those kids often or young adults, prodigals, so are we.

12:41 And so that's, that's been a really beautiful thing to begin to understand that. I want to spend a little time on the fact that you actually went in to a juvenile system, whatever it's called detention center. Yeah. Yes. The detention center. And you spent what? 24 hours there. A little longer than that. Yeah. A little longer. So I'm just let you talk a little and I want to know why did you do that? How did that happen? And what in the world are a little that you learned? I know you learned a lot because I've read every one of the things you wrote about it.

13:25 But what, what was God doing there in your life? Well, it's, it's such a, actually, it's an inspiring question to go back to the reason why. So we have across the country, roughly 200 locations where we're engaged with a local juvenile system and we have a really good relationship in Peoria, Illinois with the detention community there. And they had a facility that had three pods, three units, and one of those pods was vacant. And so our staff person has such a great relationship. CJ Fisher has such a great relationship with the local community that he came up with this idea, what would it be like for us to really immerse ourselves in this experience?

14:17 Not not as a typical onlooker, but as a resident. And so he had done it two years before he invited me to join him. And it was, I'm sure you've had this experience where it's a little like you didn't have a good excuse not to do it. And I kept trying to come up with an excuse for why this just simply didn't make sense. And it was a little like they said, you pick the date. It's not like I could say, well, I'm sorry, I'm busy that weekend. They said you find the date. So I did. And it was May of 2019. And I think it was roughly a group of eight of us, mostly volunteers from the local community that literally checked ourselves into like we were going through the intake process in the juvenile detention center.

15:04 They put us in the same clothes. They checked us into our own individual cell. They locked the doors. It was fully immersed in this experience, Judy. And I radically underestimated the impact in my own heart. There was something about both the loss of freedom, even though I knew it was a very short period of time, I had no illusion about that. But the immersion into the experience gave you this sense of what the feel and smell and experience, what it was like to sleep on a concrete slab with foam, to have just so minimal an experience from a living standpoint.

15:46 And then in a sense, the introduction to a community of, in my case, young men who were locked up, we actually spent those 24 hours engaged with those young men going through the same group therapy. They were everything from should marijuana be legalized to how do you handle anger in your life? And what was stunning to me and frankly, a gift that God gave me was that these young men ranging in age from 12 to 18 treated me like I must be there as one of their peers. I don't sort of like a posture of I don't know what you did, but you must be in here for a reason.

16:30 So we'll treat you just like one of the 13 year olds that's in here. So when when what that meant was that when we had group time, you're sitting around a table, these young men just acted like we belong there. And they were very, very responsive to any sort of question. You know, obviously, you're not pushing too deeply into a personal life. But in that context, the guard is down. And I had an experience with two young men sitting around a table where we just start talking about life and family. There is no requirement for you to say, well, let me tell you what what sin looks like.

17:13 These guys know that what they did was wrong. And you know, what they're living for is the hope that they'll get out and they won't make the same mistake again. That's that's the persistent theme. So you think about presenting the gospel against that backdrop and you think about how many barriers you have at times with people who say, you know what, my life is going well. I don't really need this. I've got things figured out. Well, that's not the narrative with a young person who's incarcerated. And so to the extent that they welcomed me in, that gave me an opportunity to learn what Jesus meant when he said when you're in there and you're looking into the face of that 13 year old boy, you're looking into my face.

17:56 I had never in my life experienced anything like it. I saw in those two young men around the table the face of Jesus. And I can't completely describe it. But I also ate for their pain. I ached for hope in their life. Somebody a voice and the receptivity to the gospel, to the message of Christ is just sort of unfettered. You get to just present through your own testimony what it means to walk with Jesus. So can you tell I still am I'm still overwhelmed a bit by that experience, Judy. So I was going to see if you would tell us one more story of the one of the boys, because each of your blog posts that you did on it and the link to his blog post will be on the show notes for this.

18:46 Each one was a different person that you talked to pretty much. So, yeah, I mean, I'd love to tell this story. And it was a young man. So we got moved from the pod we were into the pod where young people are. And we're going to we're going to have this interactive time. And I can remember my hands, palms sweaty. I mean, I've been in lots of public environments and not felt the sense of nerves I did. What is what is it going to be like? Are they going to sort of ostracize me sitting at a table with an open chair where these two young men and one of them, I'll call him Chris, I'll call him Chris. We sat and started to talk.

19:26 And as we talked, he's starting to unfold his story about his family. And at one point, because of the way he was embracing me relationally, I said, Chris, do I remind you of anybody in your family? Is there anybody like this that would have an interaction with you? And he paused like he was really giving thought to it. And he said, can you remind me of my papa Leroy? And I said, who's Papa Leroy? And he said, Papa Leroy is my grandpa. You remind me of my grandpa. And I said, all right, Chris, is that a good thing or a bad thing? He said, oh, no, it's a good thing. It's a good thing that you're you remind me of my papa Leroy.

20:09 So fast forward, this young man, Chris, when we were in group settings, he would save a seat for me when we're going to the gym. He would want me to walk beside him. I still can't quite fathom you talk about the love of Jesus. It's hey, I want you to be a part of this. So here we are. Fast forward to the very end. We've had Bible study together. We've had an opportunity to sit through group therapy together. And as I was wrapping up and he knows I'm going to leave at this point, I said to Chris, I said, all right, I've got to ask you one more question. Do I still remind you of your papa Leroy after spending a day with me? And he again, in a thoughtful pause, looked up at me and he said, no, he said, you are my papa Leroy.

20:54 Yeah. So there was something about him being the face of Jesus to me. And I think me being the face of hope and love, unconditional in that way to him. It sounds cliche. I will never forget that young man. And there's, you know, we've we in the mission of YSC worked very hard not just to connect with the young person in the system, as you described with Josh and Mike Young. What we want is that to be an on ramp to a much larger relationship when they're out. And so I know that I left Peoria and moved, came back to Denver, but CJ Fisher and our team in Peoria still engages.

21:37 I still get notes periodically on how some of those young people are doing. That is fabulous. I was so touched reading story after story. As you told them, you're also a good writer. That helps. And one of the things you're saying is, is a lot of what is my passion in my prodigal ministry is to help others see the heart of God toward them. And our tendency is because they cause us pain. And they do. Our tendency is to be angry at them or to think you're the one who's hurting me.

22:23 And as I spent time in scripture and especially in some places in Isaiah, but also in Luke 15, where there's the story of the prodigal son or the two prodigal sons, I just am overwhelmed with the heart of God for this kid who offended and was horrible to his father and basically said, I just assumed you were dead so I could get my inheritance. In fact, I'd like my inheritance, please.

23:04 And the father let him have it and let him go. You know the father's heart was broken. And yet he let him go and let him learn the hard, hard things that he learned after he had this awesome fun life with all his friends eating and drinking and using up his money. And then all of a sudden he had nothing and there was a famine and he's taking and feeding the pigs and he just assumed he could eat what the pigs were eating. And he says, oh, but at my father's place, well, the workers are taken care of. I'll just go and ask forgiveness and see if my father would let me come back as one of his hired hands.

23:52 And so he legs the long journey home. Now you know that the father has wept and prayed and begged God to restore his son because that's what I did. And that's what these people I know have done over the ones that they love. And so he's watching and he sees him coming and the son is just going to come say, forgive me, I'd like to work for you. And the father runs to him and grabs him and he says, oh, father, please forgive me. And he says, my son, my son, you're back.

24:33 And he just, you know, he not only welcome somebody, puts his robe and his sandals on him and his ring and says, let's have a party. My son was lost and now he's found. And what that is God's heart for these prodigals. And where the families of many of them can't be that for many different reasons, they might not be able to be that you and your teams are being that Mike has certainly been that to our son. Hopefully we have learned to do that as well. But if you were to be talking right now to somebody who loves a prodigal, what would you say to them?

25:20 Their heart is broken. They're lost and confused. They don't know what to do. They feel like they've done everything they know to rescue this loved one. And they're not all kids. Some are older, but what would you say to them? I'm going to go back to your invitation, Judy, to write the forward to this book going through that Luke 15 specifically verse 20. Father saw him, felt compassion, ran to him, hugged him and kissed him. And there was something in that process of writing that forward that changed in my soul. It was the fact that we're not inviting God into our prodigal journey.

26:03 He's inviting us into his prodigal journey. This is his mission, not mine. And as much as we want to fix that prodigal, engage with that prodigal, restore that prodigal, this is God's heart. And what he does with a loving parent or a Youth for Christ worker is he says, I'd love to use your hands and feet. I'd love your arms to be the arms that embrace this young person when they come back. It's us being invited into his mission. And it goes back to the fact that if we don't understand that we're all prodigals, that we are all separated from God, that we're, as Paul says in Ephesians 2, we're all dead, then in a sense, we miss the point of God's restorative love, his sacrificial love.

26:50 This is not just love for a prodigal. This is love for all prodigals, which includes me. And so this is God's mission, not mine, not yours, not somebody else who's struggling right now. And while that might feel like shallow comfort in a sense, there is power and beauty in realizing that our heavenly father loves that young man or woman. In Mago Dei, they're made in the image of God. They might be denying it or squandering it right now, but they're God's image. And he invites us into his mission, not us inviting him into our mission. And to me, that creates a wonderful comfort. And I hope it's an encouragement to others.

27:32 Well, it is to me just being reminded. Thank you, Dan. I really am grateful. And be sure and go to the show notes so you can look at the articles that he has written, at least a few of them will mention there, so that you can go to JDC with him and experience with him a little of what it was like to spend over 24 hours locked up with those kids and having a chance to touch their lives. Just as if you love a prodigal, you have this opportunity to touch their lives and to let the love of God flow through you to them.

28:21 That's one of my favorite things that God has taught me is that he's a flow through God in a sense. He loves us and he gives us everything we need to be his arms and his love to whomever God has placed in front of us, including a prodigal, a child of our own hearts who's broken our hearts. So thank you, Dan. I am so grateful and we'll maybe have you on again later. We'd love that, Judy. Thank you for doing this. Thank you for stepping into this space. What I do know and we know this is oftentimes, particularly for folks who are a part of a local church congregation, it becomes a very difficult thing for them to say, I've got a prodigal.

29:10 I've got a son or daughter who's incarcerated. So you've opened this up. You've made the gospel accessible to those who are feeling the weight of a prodigal. So blessings on you. I hope and pray that this is a wonderful success in many ways and it encourages the hearts of those who are walking with you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dan. God bless you. Thank you for joining me today on the When You Love a Prodigal podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. Your review helps the show reach more people with the hope and encouragement of Jesus.

29:53 Don't forget, take a look at the show notes and for more helpful information, resources and books, check out judydouglass.com. That's Douglass with two S's. You can find me on Facebook and on Twitter and Instagram at JudyDouglass417. Until next week.