I have read the parable of the prodigal son, as recorded in the Bible — specifically in Luke 15:11–32 — more times than I can count, and all that time I believed it was about a wayward son. It has taken me a lifetime to understand that it is also about the Father who chose to wait — to wait in love and patience and all that is noble, restrained and quietly heroic about being a parent.

It is easy to focus on the rebellion of the son — his hunger, the shame of tending pigs, the mud clinging to him, the squandered inheritance slipping through reckless fingers. It is easy to dramatise the fall; collapse is visible, measurable, almost cinematic. Through his collapse, we extract lessons about bad choices and consequence, and perhaps we feel a certain moral reassurance that the story makes sense.

But now, as I write — and as I have watched men and women fracture from their children because of choices made in youth or pride or pain — and as I have watched children harden themselves against the very ones who raised them — I find that my ache has shifted. I ache for the father. The father who stayed.

He did not chase the boy down the road as he watched him leave with his premature inheritance in his pocket, fully aware of the likelihood that it would be squandered. He did not clutch at his son’s sleeve and cry, “You owe me.” There was no screaming, no public unraveling, no dramatic outburst between them. He neither threatened nor collapsed, nor did he stage a performance of wounded dignity to preserve his pride before the village. He divided the inheritance and released his child — and I can only imagine that he did so while feeling a kind of death within himself, a grief so profound that words would have been insufficient and action futile.

I imagine him standing in the courtyard long after the dust settled, the servants quieter than usual, the neighbours whispering behind lowered voices, his older son watching carefully and drawing conclusions unique to youth — conclusions about fairness, about loyalty, about what is deserved. I imagine the family table that evening, one place suddenly larger than it had ever been, and quieter. And still, the father waited.

He did not wait with clenched fists or rehearsed speeches about what he would say if repentance ever appeared at his gate. He did not rehearse humiliation or moral lectures. Instead, through the long, silent season of absence, he trained his eyes toward the horizon. I know that look with intimacy. It is the look of someone who has decided that love will not be withdrawn even if relationship has been, someone who understands that control may secure compliance but it cannot secure the heart.

This is the first lesson: love does not control to secure loyalty, because loyalty born of control is not loyalty at all — it is fear. And so real love releases, even knowing it risks humiliation, rejection, misunderstanding and grief.

When the son finally returns, he does not return magnificent or reformed in visible splendour. He returns thin, smelling of animals, carrying the unmistakable air of someone who has reached the lowest point of his life through his own choices. He has prepared a speech — a careful demotion of himself: “Make me like one of your hired servants.” In that sentence, he restructures the relationship; his father becomes employer, he becomes hired help. It is an attempt at survival more than reconciliation.

And yet the father does something culturally undignified. He runs. In that world, older men did not run. They walked with composure; they preserved authority through restraint. But this father lifts his robes and runs toward the boy — before the village can shame him, before the apology is completed, before character has been proven through time. He runs toward him as he is.

This is the second lesson: love moves toward the broken before they earn restoration. The father does not negotiate terms. He places a robe on him — not a servant’s garment but his own. He places a ring on his finger — restoring authority and sonship. He ensures sandals cover his feet — because sons, not servants, wear sandals. In that sequence, identity is restored before performance is measured. There is no probationary period, no slow earning back of affection.

How many fathers struggle to do this? How many require visible grovelling, extended proof, or permanent demotion? How many say, “You may return, but you will never stand where you once stood”? This father refuses such calculations.

And yet the story does not conclude with the embrace. There is another son — the obedient one, the steady one, the one who counted his loyalty like coins and measured fairness with precision. He stands outside the celebration, wounded in a different way, and the father goes out again. That detail unsettles me deeply. The father does not choose between sons; he does not dismiss the elder with irritation or say, “You should know better.” He pleads with him. “Everything I have is yours.” The father’s heart is not divided by two children; it is expanded enough to hold them both.

Here lies the lesson that lingers with me: from the father’s perspective, there are two lost children — one lost in rebellion and one lost in resentment — and he moves toward both. If I am honest, and honesty is required if one is to write truthfully, I have inhabited all three roles at different seasons of my life: the one who left, the one who stayed and judged, and, in rare and trembling moments, the one who waited.

To wait without bitterness is a spiritual discipline. To restore without humiliation requires strength of a rare order. To celebrate someone who wounded you is a courage beyond pride. Perhaps the deepest lesson from the father’s point of view is this: he refuses to define his son by his worst chapter. “This son of mine was dead and is alive again.” He frames the narrative around life, not betrayal.

What might our families look like if we told our stories that way? Not, “You betrayed us,” but, “You are alive again.”

There is something in this parable that feels older than doctrine. It feels like a blueprint for generational healing — release without disowning, waiting without rotting, running without rehearsing superiority, restoring without probation, pleading with both the dutiful and the defiant. Perhaps that is what real authority looks like — not dominance, not moral accounting, but a love so secure in itself that it can afford to be undignified and to wait.

After all, we cannot script the timing of another’s awakening. And perhaps this is what it truly means to let go of our children — not to control their journey, but to keep the door open, trusting that love planted deeply enough does not disappear, even when it wanders far from home,

~ Evgenia Pimżin