If you have children still at home, or perhaps grandchildren for whom you care, you may have experienced occasions when they didn’t want to go to church. As frustrating as that can be, the feeling of disappointment and concern reaches a new level when those children are adults.
That’s where we found ourselves as parents a few years ago, as Christmas approached. Our son had been raised in our devoted family, knew the Bible well, had been active in church even as a teenager, and eventually attended and excelled at a strong Christian college. But after graduation, he reluctantly but firmly told us he just didn’t believe what we believe any more.
Those months between graduation and Christmas were heavy ones for us as parents. After a brief summer internship in Nashville, our son returned home to live with us while he looked for his first career job. During that time, we took a father-son trip to climb five Colorado mountains, and I asked him to be my driver to several fall associational meetings.
Whenever we had extended time together, I sought to turn the conversation to spiritual things, and to understanding why Christian faith was no longer compelling to him. Those discussions were always respectful, carefully worded, intellectually intense, and ultimately non-persuasive.
So when the last Sunday before Christmas rolled around, our son was dutiful at best about attending. And frankly, I don’t remember anything particularly remarkable about that morning’s worship service, other than its obvious Christmas theme. But during that worship service, God gripped our son’s heart, and convinced him that He is real, and holy.
That encounter sent my cerebral son back into the Bible, and to prayer, this time with eyes of faith and a heart ready to believe. When he assembled our family, he joyfully announced his faith, and apologized for the pain and concern he knew he had caused us.
For us, that period of deep parental concern that seemed so endless and deep at the time now seems like a brief dream. We now watch our son love his family, and lead a small group at his church, and pursue friends who don’t yet know the Lord, all with thoughtful faith that is somehow richer for the depths of his doubt.
I don’t tell this story of our family’s Christmastime miracle a lot, but it seems that whenever I do, I hear from a number of parents who are deeply concerned for their own wayward children or grandchildren. Often they ask what we did, or what they can do, to hasten the return of their prodigal child.
My honest response is that neither my wife nor I controlled in any way our son’s return to faith, or the timing of it. We did do our best to preserve a good relationship, and to communicate a motive of sincere love, both verbally and non-verbally. And we did continue to have spiritual conversations that were gentle, but persistent, when the moment seemed right. Our son would later say how much it meant to him that we “pursued” him, even when he acted like he didn’t want that.
But no one was more surprised than me that a seemingly routine Christmas service at a small Baptist church was the vehicle and the moment that God would choose to break through to the hardened heart of one of the most important people in my life. Our gracious Lord providentially chooses those moments, just as he did his own arrival that first Christmas. But my testimony is that those moments do come, and that they are worth all the pain, and the prayer, and the pursuit, and the wait.
Nate Adams is executive director of the Illinois Baptist State Association.