Old Books, God and Ourselves, Norman Cox, Part 2. Imagine your son asking: “Dad I want my share of the inheritance NOW. I know that it is normal for children to receive their inheritance after their father’s death, but I don’t want to wait.” Would you cash in your IRA or sell stock to give your son what he wanted? Amazingly, the prodigal’s father did just that. Why give in to his impudence? Cox explains that there “comes a time when fathers can no longer protect their children from themselves.” Dad knew that this boy would have to learn hard truths the hard way: “Far countries always turn out more and more like home the longer you stay there.... People are people the world over. If they cut your throat on Wall Street, they will skin you alive in Hong Kong. If they don’t appreciate you in Podunk where they know you, they certainly won’t appreciate you in Paris where they never saw you before. At home the young son was at least the son of his father. In the far country he was only a foreign yokel ripe for fleecing.”

How many of us have felt the pull of the far country -- a new city, a new job, a new church, a new spouse? I know a woman in a troubled marriage whose friends wanted to navigate her to a destination called Relief. There would be stopovers along the way: Peace, Freedom, New Start, New Husband. It all sounded like the ports-of-call on a cruise brochure (which always leave out some destinations: Sickness, Bad Weather, Cramped Accommodations.) Relief, she believed, would remove her pain; offer a quick solution; absolve her of responsibility. But she discovered that she had been duped -- she was believing the “lies of Satan rather than the harsh but redemptive truths of God.” When she was willing to listen, God showed her that her marriage’s problems were not terminal, that her husband was not solely at fault, that hard work could save her marriage.