Tricia had been in the choir when she was a little girl. She loved the music. It was the best part of an otherwise rather boring experience. One of the first ways she exhibited her rebellion against her parents was to refuse to go to church when she was a sophomore in high school.
Unfortunately that was not the only way she rebelled. She was soon “looking for love in all the wrong places” as the song goes. She sought it in drugs, sex, drinking and a generally wild lifestyle. Her parents had given up in despair. Now, unfortunately, she was pregnant and scared.
Maybe it was nostalgia for the music but for some reason she rose early one Sunday morning and shocked her parents by announcing that she was going to church. She was not a little nervous in her obviously pregnant state as she entered those old familiar doors. It was Carol Zuric, her old Sunday school teacher, who first spotted her and came running up to throw her arms around her. But soon there were others, adults and peers, who she had long ago lost contact with, all greeting her as if she had been on a long journey and had just arrived home. There was grace in that moment and she finally understood the parable of the Prodigal Son from the inside out.
