Lindsey Doss - Via Front Porch Friends

Dear Praying Love One,

You don’t know that in a short time I will be at your doorstep, asking to come home. You are unaware that I will have wanted to give up everything—the friends, the sin, the relationships, the lifestyles, even the anger and the hatred.

You don’t know that when I come back, I will be stronger than ever. I will be more on fire for God than I have ever been. I will grow, and I will change. I will be closer to you than ever. We will laugh and love again, and like Lazarus, although I was dead, I will live again.

You are oblivious to the fact that each time, each step I take, I take closer to God, to you, toward life. But I am also fighting shame and fear every inch of the way. I wish I could tell you what it is like to live with a tormented mind. I am terrified. Life looks like death, and death looks like life. The enemy wears a mask that looks like home and disguises hell to look like home.

My mind is bound. It is held tightly in the clenched fist of deception. I have to fill my mind constantly with noise so that I will never be left with my own tormenting thoughts. I am confused. I am always straining to make sense of and justify my life. But since there is no peace found in sin, no clarity ever comes.

I keep trying to flee from the dark, but I end up running deeper into it. I pretend to love the darkness, but I actually hate it.

I will come home, but first I will need a renewed mind. I can never settle, never slow down, never own up, and never be alone. So for now I must continue to surround myself with people who will justify my choices. If I can get enough people in my corner, then maybe—just maybe—I can convince myself that I’m okay. After all, if that many people agree with me, how wrong can I be?

Better yet, maybe—just maybe—with enough people I could convince you, or even God, that I’m right. I wish I could persuade you that I am happy, that this person is the relationship I really want, or that this is God’s plan for my life. I might even go so far as to find pastors and leaders who will take up my cause. I will go so far as to twist the Word of God to make myself feel right.

But that desperate need to justify myself is the proof that you need to know that I am wrong.

I will come home, but first I need the voices of others to be silenced. It will devastate you to see me hit rock bottom. It will shatter your heart to see me lonely, without money, hungry, hurting, sad, and confused. But rock bottom is exactly the place I need to get to for you—and for me to get there, I have to lose everything. I have to lose everyone. I have to lose whatever is keeping me at any level of comfort and stability.

I have to find myself in the deepest, darkest pit, for that is the only place where I will start to see the consequence of my choices. And there, I will begin looking for God with desperate longing once again.

I will come home, but first I have to shatter.

You cannot imagine the depth to which I hate myself and what my life has turned into. My dreams are gone, and this lifestyle is not what the deceiver told me it would be. I believe I am too far gone to come back, and even if I do come back, I feel that you might not want me. I figure that you will shun me, and I’m afraid you will turn me away.

I fear people’s opinions and the reputation I will forever have to live in the shadow of. I fear that I have hurt you too much to face you again. I’m afraid of the actions I will have to take in order to come home. I will need a radical change in my life, and I want that beautiful life—but it terrifies me.

In the deepest part of my soul, in the place no one will ever see, I miss you. I want you, and I want to find my way home.

I will come home, but first I need you to forgive me.

Love,
Your prodigal.