The Lord be with you! I can identify with the prodigal son in Luke 15 and hence the name of this blog.

I have, in some fashion or another, “run away” from God for the past 40 years. As an undergraduate student, my late father suggested on more than one occasion that I should enter seminary. I said Wall Street and set my sails accordingly.

I never completely lost sight of Dad’s remarks. The idea would surface from time to time only to be ignored, waived away, denied – the money chase, the illness of “affluenza,” was always the overriding motivation and then I screwed up in a very big way.

Imprisonment is a life changing experience. I questioned everything about myself: my motivations, my ethics and my faith. It was my time to eat pods with the pigs.

Yet, the “hound of heaven,” to borrow a phrase from an old friend, continued to nip more aggressively at my heels to the point where I was bitten enough to come to my senses and return home.

And indeed, the Father ran to greet me: seminary was the celebration. Like Luke’s prodigal, I have my share of older brothers, but that’s their problem, not mine.

This blog contains my musings and commentaries within that context, framed by scripture and often by the poets and prophets of our day. My hope is that what appears on these pages will help not just me, but you as well, to sense the work of God in our midst and what we are being called to do in our role as God’s servants shaping the kingdom.