Come Home, Child

Come Home, Child

The story of a prodigal daughter, an absent father, and the God who waited twelve years to say: “Come home.”

📖 “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take care of me.” — Psalm 27:10 (NKJV)

📍 Story Moment: How does a little girl put words to feelings she’s never been taught to identify? She doesn’t. She just learns to carry them.

🕯️ My earliest memories of my papa are wrapped in the smell of a bar.

Haus Herkenroth. The clink of glasses, the hum of strangers’ voices, a world he inhabited that had very little room in it for me. He wasn’t a cruel man — I want to say that clearly. He was simply… elsewhere. Always elsewhere. Even when he was in the same room.

When we moved to South Africa, I think I hoped things might be different. A new country, a fresh beginning. Perhaps now there’d be space for the kind of father who came home, who sat on the floor, who looked you in the eye and stayed. Instead, the pattern followed us across the ocean. Work swallowed his days, and the German Club swallowed his evenings, and I learned — somewhere in the quiet of all that waiting — to stop expecting him.

💔 No one taught me to name what I was feeling. No one sat with me and said: this is grief, this is longing, this is what it feels like when someone who is supposed to choose you — doesn’t. So I didn’t name it. I folded it up and tucked it somewhere deep, and I called that coping. A little girl doesn’t have the language for a wound she’s never been told she has.

Then God sent me Mams and Paps.

I was seven years old when they stepped in — the first of several precious sets of parents God would place around me over the years, each for their season, each carrying a glimpse of what love looks like when it shows up. They weren’t permanent fixtures, these beautiful people; they were representatives. Brief, tender signposts of a Father I hadn’t yet met, pointing me — without knowing it — toward Someone whose presence would never pack up and leave.

🙏 I came to Christ at eighteen. I gave Him my heart — genuinely, wholly, with everything I had. I knew the warmth of belonging. I had found a Father. I had, for a real and precious season, come home.

Years later, my life began to fall apart.

Losses came — the kind that rip the mat out from under you, knock the air out of you and leave you standing in the wreckage, looking around for the God who was supposed to be there — the God who shows up through the body of Christ.

In that season, I felt unsupported — unseen in our struggle, and profoundly alone under the weight we were carrying. This wasn’t the first rejection I had known, but this time it came clothed in the language of faith. What should have reflected Christlike care felt painfully absent.

One day I ran into a so-called friend from church and, in a rare moment of honesty, told her where I was at. Her response was swift: “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. God loves you and so do we.” The words were meant to reassure, yet they landed like dismissal. I didn’t feel loved, seen, heard, or valued. When I sought help from our pastor, I was told: “As a life group leader, you should be beyond this.” When I needed presence, there had been silence. When I needed care, there had been absence. The gap between what was spoken and what was lived widened the wound.

💔 I felt betrayed, rejected, and abandoned. Though I was familiar with rejection from family and friends, experiencing it from the body of Christ broke something within me. Trust in people shattered, and my trust in God faltered alongside it. I had concluded: if this was Christianity, I wouldn’t need it. My heart closed — not in rebellion, but in self-protection. Trust felt too costly. Belief felt unsafe.

For the next twelve years, I slipped into a state of survival, and my heart grew weary beneath the strain of holding everything together. I learned to breathe shallowly so the pain wouldn’t notice me. I learned to make myself smaller so the sadness wouldn’t require an explanation. Functioning replaced feeling. Endurance replaced hope. I was no longer living; I was merely existing.

🌤️ Twelve years is a long time to be away from home.

A growing hunger for worship led me to a small choir at a local church. During a Sunday service, in the midst of worship, I sensed the Lord whisper quietly to my heart:

“It is time to come home, child.”

The words weren’t loud, yet they were unmistakable — echoing a promise I had known for years but had struggled to believe.

📖 “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take care of me.” — Psalm 27:10 (NKJV)

🕊️ I know now that He had seen the whole story. Every room I’d thought was empty, He had been in. Every season when He sent someone — Mams, Paps, a family for a time — He had been the One providing, covering, holding. Every loss I’d carried as evidence of His absence, He had been present in, even when I couldn’t feel it.

He hadn’t abandoned me. He had been fathering me all along — and now, after twelve years, He was standing at the edge of the road, watching me come back from a long way off, and He was running.

📖 “I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you.” — John 14:18 (NKJV)

I wept. Right there, before I sang a single note. I wept for the little girl who never had the words. I wept for the eighteen-year-old who had found a Father, and then lost her way. I wept for twelve years of distance, and for the God who had spent every one of those years with the porch light on. I wept because He knew — He had always known — and He had never once looked away.

Come home, child. After everything. After all of it.

Come home.

🌱 That moment didn’t resolve everything in an instant. I want to be honest with you about that, because testimony that skips the hard middle doesn’t serve anyone.

I’ve worked through many of the judgements I carried — against my papa, against the church, against the leadership, against a God I had accused of doing what my father did. Through repentance, through forgiveness, through choosing again and again to lay down verdicts I had every human right to hold. It’s been real work, slow work, holy work. Some of those stones I’ve set down completely. Others I’ve had to return to, pick up, and examine again in the light.

Fully healed? 🤔 I doubt it — not yet, not completely. Even as I write this, I feel the tears welling up and my chest tightening. Some wounds run so deep that the body remembers them before the mind catches up. Healing, in my experience, isn’t a destination you arrive at and plant your flag in. It’s a country you learn to live in, one honest step at a time. What I know is that I am further in than I was. That the wounds have less power than they did. That I can speak my papa’s name now without the old weight behind it, and I can speak God’s name as Father without flinching.

What changed in that choir loft was something more foundational than instant wholeness: I began to understand who my Father actually is. Not a man behind a bar counter. Not a congregation that closes its hands when yours are empty. My Father is the One who runs. The One who sends representatives ahead of Himself so a seven-year-old girl knows she isn’t invisible. The One who keeps the light on for twelve years and says, when you finally find your way back: I knew you’d come. I never stopped waiting.

I am still learning what it means to live as a daughter — truly loved, truly seen, truly home. There are days when the old wound whispers its old lies, and I have to choose again to believe what He said. There are also days — more and more of them — when I sit in the warmth of His presence and feel, all the way down, that I am not forsaken. That I never was.

🪨 My Life Verse in this season:

📖 “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take care of me.” — Psalm 27:10 (NKJV)

✍️ Story in a Sentence: “I spent years carrying feelings I had no words for — and twelve years running from a Father who never stopped waiting — until the day He called me home.”

💡 Reflection

“You don’t have to have it all figured out to begin. Your story matters — even the parts that still hurt, even the chapters you’d rather skip. Take a moment with these questions and let the Holy Spirit lead you gently…”

• What did the word father teach you growing up — about love, about presence, about whether you were worth staying for? 🤔
• Have you ever walked away from God because His people, or your circumstances, made it feel like He had walked away from you? 🤔
• Are there feelings from your childhood or your losses that you’ve never had words for — griefs you folded up and called normal? 🤔
• Who has God sent into your life as a representative of His love, even briefly, even for a season? 🤔
• Can you see His hand in that now? 🤔
• If God were to speak into the middle of your ordinary today, what do you think He’d most want to say to you? 🤔

🎺 Affirmation

You are not an orphan. You were never abandoned by the Father who matters most — He saw every empty evening, every unfelt loss, every feeling you had no name for, every year you spent with your back turned. He was there. He is here. He kept the light on. He called you by name and wrote you into His family — not as an afterthought, not as a second chance, but as a beloved, chosen, fully-adopted child.

You don’t have to have the words. You don’t have to have it all figured out. You just have to come home.

🕊️ “And if this is your story too — even a fragment of it — know that you are not alone. God sees. God knows. God redeems.”

🙌 Prayer

“Lord, I lay this story — all of it — at Your feet. The beautiful parts and the broken ones. Take it, and let it be of use…”

Father, I come to You as a daughter — still learning what that means, still unfolding into the fullness of it. Thank You for not giving up on me during twelve years of silence. Thank You for the porch light You kept burning. Thank You for speaking into an ordinary worship service and finding me — again — right where I stood.

I release my papa into Your hands. I release the judgements I’ve carried — against him, against the church, against You. Forgive me for the times I’ve confused Your face with his. You are not him. You never were.

Let me keep living from the truth You spoke: that I am adopted, chosen, and called home. Let the healing that’s already begun keep going — however long it takes, however many times I have to return to the altar. Let this story reach every prodigal daughter who’s been away too long and is afraid the door might be locked — and let it tell them: the light is still on. Come home.

In Jesus’ Name, Amen.

🕯️ There is a Father who doesn’t disappear after work. A Father who isn’t distracted or distant or too tired to come home. He sends people ahead of Him so you’ll know He’s real — and then He waits, however long it takes, and when He sees you coming, He runs.

Your story isn’t over. His love isn’t finished. Come home, child. The light was on the whole time.