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Journal entry, August 19, 1996: Where is my son?
This question began what became a steady stream of notations documenting the disorienting passage in my life when one of my children left the world in which my husband and I had reared him—the world of faith. An unexpected aspect of this painful season has been the equally forbidding sojourn his pilgrimage has meant for me.

Before our son was born, my husband and I took "natural" childbirth classes. The pain was supposed to be "managed" by breathing techniques. But by the time I was pushing that boy through my loins (after 36 hours of labor), the classes didn't mean a thing: Nothing could have prepared me for what that felt like. In the same way, nothing in all the parenting books I had dutifully read prepared me for the stages of pain and grief that having a prodigal child brought to my otherwise well-ordered, biblically packaged, evangelical world.

Early on, when I first began to wonder what was happening in my son, I pictured the saucer-eyed, silky-haired little helper who used to come to me as a four-year-old with pen and paper in hand and ask, "Mom, draw me an Ewok" (the furry creatures from The Return of the Jedi). I drew so many of them I could have marketed them.

Our son was the same age when he told us he was afraid of dying. We talked to him about his fear and tried to help him understand that, when we belong to Jesus, we don't have to be afraid. He wanted that assurance, and my husband, Bob, on the spot, helped him pray. Our son prayed the words after my husband, asking the Lord to come into his heart and free him from his fears. He prayed loudly, clearly, without mumbling.

When he was 10, he took Communion for the first time. He said he felt like he "was growing in God" when he took it. A year later, he asked his dad (a pastor) to baptize him. He was nervous at first, he said, but afterward he was "excited."

When confusing things started to happen during his later teens—things that signaled a departure from our unwritten family "covenant" (the details of which do not pertain here)—I brought assumptions to the situation that operated out of the Ewok-era model of who my child was to me. (This is where mothers tend to lose all grounding in reality.) So the first leg of my sojourn as a prodigal's mother involved general disorientation: I was trying to reconcile who this person is in relationship to who he was. What went wrong? What had I done to turn my son against me?

I found comfort in the prophet Isaiah, who became the mouthpiece for God's own laments over his wayward Israel: "This is what the LORD says, 'The children I raised and cared for have turned against me. Even the animals—the donkey and the ox—know their owner and appreciate his care. But not my people Israel. No matter what I do for them, they still do not understand' " (Isa. 1:23 NLT; all Scripture references are from the NLT unless noted otherwise).

I thought that if God experienced this kind of heartache, then perhaps my son's wanderings were not necessarily attributable to my failures alone.

My disorientation evolved into spiritual resolve to do battle for my son's soul—to wage a campaign to rescue him from the Devil. I arose early in the mornings to be alone with God, first to right myself in his presence, and then to storm the gates of heaven on my son's behalf. I fasted. I prayed. I even went so far as to go into his room and face down the myriad freakish posters and photos he had posted on his walls. I defied these people to try and steal my son's soul out from under me.

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October 26 1998, Vol. 42, No. 12