Seven Days with the Prodigal Father Sýnishorn

 From a Shipwrecked Life to Rock Bottom 

  People who feed pigs and live with pigs soon start acting like pigs themselves. This young man’s hunger had driven him to such desperation that he was willing to eat even the most vile, disgusting food, but he still couldn’t satisfy his hunger. He had started out trying to find adventure, success, love, and pleasure but his quest led him to one dead end after another. Finally, after he had squandered everything he had, he hit rock bottom and still was not satisfied!

Proverbs 15:21 tells us that, “Folly is joy to him who is destitute of discernment, but a man of understanding walks uprightly” (NKJV). The prodigal’s folly was fun while it lasted, but his need for discernment left him needier than he ever could have dreamed. I meet so many people who are in that pigpen, stuffing their lives with the vilest things in an attempt to satisfy the deep longing in their hearts. Still, no matter how hard they try, they remain lonely, desperate, and dissatisfied with a heart like an aching black hole — their empty souls longing to be filled… And nothing that anyone gives them can seem to make a difference. 

Some people shuffle the deck of life and play the hand they are dealt whether the cards come up with relationships, financial success, elevated status, or the virtue gambit from heights of religious achievement to the depths of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. But whatever edge of the spectrum they are on, reassuringly moral to chillingly immoral, it doesn’t take long to discover that an eternal soul cannot be filled with anything from this world. Consequently, the prodigal son’s journey was a graveyard spin that seemed impossible to escape, until one day he woke up and thought, “How did this happen? How did I get here? Is there any help for me? Or do I have to crash and burn?”