The View from the Field
A Sister’s Story about a Prodigal Brother
The parable of the Prodigal Son is one of the most familiar stories in Scripture.
I have spent much of my life standing in the field with the older brother, watching the road, keeping score, and only slowly learning what the Father had shown: grace.
Throughout my life, I have found myself noticing the brother in the field. We are given only a few details about him. He stayed close to home. He worked faithfully. He did what was expected of him. I've spent years considering the older brother's perspective. He is often dismissed, or rather, his outburst is described as an act of jealousy.
I have an emotional reaction to hearing that, but why?
I understand what it feels like to watch someone you love walk away, run away, and demand to leave. I understand what it feels like to see perversion, recklessness, and turmoil take their toll on the lives of people that I love.
I don’t just hear a jealous brother; there’s more to his story.
The Observant Daughter.
I have two brothers, both older than me. My oldest brother is currently serving time in prison, and my other brother has special needs.
I was generally considered the easy child: kind and compliant. What I failed to notice, however, was the resentment and self-righteousness quietly growing beneath the surface.
Those were some of the discoveries from my own investigation of the daughter in the field.
Growing up, when so much attention was needed elsewhere, I became an observer.
Even as a child, I paid close attention to the lives unfolding around me; I loved to observe people. I saw how difficult life seemed for some people to navigate. That frightened me.
My oldest brother's rebellion frightened me too.
While he pushed against authority, I moved in the opposite direction. Being called “goody-two-shoes" was his way of mocking that tendency. I followed my parents' curfew until I married at twenty. Obedience felt safe to me.
For most of my life, I've identified with the oldest brother of the parable. And not because I was especially virtuous, but because his sense of injustice around his brother’s redemption felt familiar to me.
Looking back, what appeared to be goodness was but a mixture of fear, compliance, and a desire to avoid becoming another concern. That posture kept me out of trouble, but it also left room for my ego to grow, mostly unnoticed and unchecked for some time.
The Trusting Son.
The middle child, my other older brother. We are only a year apart in age and spent much of our childhood as best friends. He is outgoing, friendly, and wonderfully lacking in a social filter. Whatever he notices about you, you'll likely hear about it. People are where they were last seen, and they will probably look the same when you see them again.
My mom likes to tell a story about police officers stopping him while he was riding his bike and asking if he had seen our oldest brother, who was on the run. My brother told them what he was wearing and that he was in the park behind our house.
The police swarmed the park.
The part that always makes my mother laugh is that several days had passed since he had last seen our brother. In his mind, that's simply where his brother was.
When he was just two weeks old, he aspirated, and the resulting loss of oxygen caused permanent brain damage. From that moment on, he required more guidance than I did.
I have faint memories of practicing the alphabet with him, hoping he’d learn the song with me. My mother confesses that he was raised more like the “baby” of the family.
With extra care came a need for patience; a lesson each of us would revisit many times over the years. We learned to anticipate problems before they happened, and my parents learned how to advocate for him in a world that wasn’t always so understanding.
In high school, most of the students and faculty swooned over his sociable demeanor. He would even wave me down in the hallways. But school was not always kind. Some teachers failed to provide adequate supervision, and some classmates took advantage of his vulnerabilities. Yet you would never know how cruel people could be by talking with him. That may be my favorite thing about him.
The Prodigal (Lost) Son.
My oldest brother was a “troubled youth”. That sounds weird to say. He was in trouble, a lot. With the law. With school. In church. With other parents.
My mom tells a story about him at five years old breaking into a house down the street and covering the walls with spray paint.
The police were called.
My brother being in trouble was all I'd ever known. I'm four years younger than he is.
Do the math.
He was twelve when he stole his first car and drove it across state lines to visit his girlfriend. She just happened to be the daughter of a state marshal; he was chill though.
I was around twelve when he was sent away to a boot-camp-style program for troubled youth. Eventually, he was arrested at gunpoint. He turned eighteen in juvenile detention before being transferred to the adult system. From there, he went to prison, sentenced to twenty years.
In reflection, that was a bizarre way to grow up.
There were things I loved about my brother. His sense of adventure made me envious; I was always the cautious one.
One of my favorite memories comes from middle school. I had forgotten to get a permission slip signed and needed to go to the school office and call home for approval. My brother answered the phone and told me that Mom wasn't home. I was trying not to cry.
Noticing my distress, he said, "Let me talk to them. I'll just tell them I'm Dad and give you permission to go."
And it worked!
What would have seemed chaotic and dysfunctional to many families felt normal to ours. Not knowing what would happen next was simply part of life. We lived in a constant state of unpredictability. Life simply moved forward, and we learned to move with it.
Prodigal Living.
As the years passed, it seemed that every glimpse of hope was followed by another disappointment. Eventually, all the squandering that my brother did caught up with him.
One might say that he, too, was sleeping with the ‘swine’.
He was released from prison on shock probation at twenty years old, but within months he was back in trouble for violating parole. While awaiting trial, he escaped from a courthouse, was shot, and ended up on life support. He survived, but the incident added more prison time and seemed only to harden his attitude. He described the experience as cold and numbing. He didn't see God then.
His presence often carried its own kind of concern; like everyone was always waiting for the next thing to happen.
One memory captures this tension perfectly. I was walking my dog, and my brother tagged along. He took the leash to look inconspicuous. He was just passing through; he had warrants, so my mother wouldn’t let him stay at our house. Not long afterward, two police officers slowly pulled alongside us. Without missing a beat, my brother told me to be cool; he made a fat joke and took off running, laughing. Suddenly, one officer was cruising slowly down the road while the other was sprinting after him, visibly out of breath. There I stood, frozen, staring at my dog’s leash on the ground.
My dog and I were equally bewildered.
People laugh, and I like to tell it, but what I never say is how those moments left me.
Later, I pleaded with God to watch over him, scared, in my room. Through it all, my brother remained a constant subject of my prayers. I have been asking God to protect, care for, and draw him to Himself, faithfully. I believe God is a just Father.
I am still learning to trust Him and give thanks even when circumstances seem unbearable.
Sometimes, when the very things I've prayed for begin to happen, old wounds seem to speak louder than my gratitude.
Like the older brother from the field, I found myself reluctant to enter the celebration. When looking upon seeing my brother adored, in the secret of my prayers, I wept. The feelings I had poured into teenage journals, feelings I believed were buried with them, abruptly showed up with him.
Jesus taught that reconciliation matters. We are not called to ignore conflict and pretend everything is well. We are called to pursue peace where we can.
Bittersweet
As an adult, revisiting this story, I hear the father's response differently than I did before. When I was younger, I focused on what the brother in the field didn't receive. The attention, the celebration, the excitement. I only saw how his brother asked for his inheritance, left, squandered it, and returned home to a feast.
As I've grown older, I've realized that some of God's greatest gifts become so familiar that we stop recognizing them as gifts at all.
I was given a constant so reliable that I took it for granted. God’s presence.
Instead of thanking Him for His faithfulness, I was often asking Him to acknowledge mine. Yet He was present in every corner of my life. He heard every prayer, every fear, and every thought. I was never alone, even when I felt alone. I have had God in my life ever since my memories started staying. I’m so thankful for His mercies on me. That will always be my silver lining.
I have always had stability, shelter, and people who loved me. That is why I understand the meaning of bittersweet. During one of the most chaotic summers, as T.D. Jakes says, when the crushing was occurring, God quietly inserted a gift. My brother's girlfriend had a brother named James. While chaos often followed my brother, so did James. But he caught my attention; I fell in love.
He was kind, steady, and thoughtful. It was only a summer romance then. Looking back now, I can see that while one part of my life was breaking, God was building something else. Years later, I married him.
Remember, “everything I have is yours”.
I’ve taken that for granted, far too long.
Responsibility
I resonate with the son in the field; only he’s the eldest. It makes sense to me that he would have been the responsible one, helping care for the family. Throughout my childhood, I longed for that dynamic. I desperately wanted my oldest brother to become a dependable, responsible part of our family.
Perhaps because Scripture tells us so little about him, I find myself filling in the blanks with my own experiences. As for my brother, I spent years trying to understand him from every angle. He perplexed me. He seemed to have so much potential, yet everything slipped through his fingers.
He appeared fearless, but often what looked like courage was recklessness.
Looking back at myself, that early mixture of fear and compliance had quietly become part of my identity.
Jesus' parable of the talents often reminds me that God entrusts each person with something to steward. From a young age, I sensed God calling me toward something beyond myself, though vague. Like others, I have been given gifts, opportunities, and responsibilities. My role is to faithfully sow it, pursuing God’s will.
These reflections have become an act of honesty before God. Through writing, He has been teaching me to process my life with greater clarity and humility.
As I've reflected on this season of my life, I've realized how layered it was. I was trying to figure out who I was and who I wanted to become. Like many teenagers, I was angry more often than I understood, and I was convinced no one understood me.
I have been angry.
I remember resenting the compassion my parents showed my brother. From my immature understanding, I interpreted mercy as favoritism. When they spoke kindly about him or extended grace to him. I would think, they don’t even know who he really is.
Of course, I didn’t really either.
I envied the freedoms my brother seemed to enjoy. He went places, saw people, and had fewer restrictions than I did. I can remember pleading with my parents for half of that. Looking back, I see that what I called freedom was often just him disrespecting boundaries.
Younger me often felt as though she was held to consequences for choices she never made, cleaning up messes she didn't create. It's not fair was the hill she died on in every argument. Even now, I can recognize that girl who still wants to stomp her feet and shout those words.
She’s still present, but she no longer gets the final word.
What once felt like pure injustice, I now see as a heart that needed the Father’s correction just as much as my brother did.
When my other brother required extra attention, patience, and support, I felt similar emotions. The circumstances were no one's fault, but as a child, I didn't always understand the difference between favoritism and necessity. I was sometimes jealous, and I hated that about myself. Looking back, I can give grace to that younger version of myself. She was trying to make sense of things while everyone else was doing the same.
When I read that the older brother was angry, I’m thankful that God has given me a deeper understanding of my own heart posture. The celebration exposed something that had been there all along.
Perhaps years of being "the responsible one" while his brother consumed the family's attention, resources, and emotional energy had left wounds beneath the surface. Perhaps he carried disappointments he never voiced. Perhaps the celebration itself wasn't what made him angry.
Perhaps it simply revealed the anger that was already there.
A view from the field.
I can imagine the quiet sense of betrayal the older brother felt as he watched his father respond with joy. His brother had left. Everyone knew it. How much worry and heartache must have followed that? He left work and burdens unequally shared. Yet when he returned, their father met him with joy instead of rebuke and celebrated with him instead of scorning him.
I imagine the older brother spending long hours in that field, working while replaying moments in his mind. As minds do. Turning disappointments into evidence and evidence into anger. Just as the prodigal son rehearsed his speech on the journey home, I imagine the brother in the field rehearsing a few speeches of his own.
I did.
I don't know how many times I've confronted my brother in the field of my mind. How many speeches I've rehearsed. How many mic-drop endings I've perfected. I've argued. I've screamed. I've been prophetic. I've been profane. I've placed it in God's hands and then quietly stolen it back.
Learning to Forgive the Prodigal
For years the anger and the fairness ledger lived side by side with my prayer life. Only recently have I begun to see that the celebration itself was never the problem; it was my heart’s posture.
Though, despite everything I've vaguely shared, forgiveness was not especially difficult for me until recent years. I may have been justified on paper by the standards of everyday people, but in Christ, I am not justified in holding on to unforgiveness.
As I've gotten older, I've stopped reading the parable as though its primary purpose is to celebrate the son coming home. There is a bigger picture.
I am a mother now. Through the eyes of a parent, I understand the father's response differently than I once did. I have two teenage daughters. I know they will make mistakes, leave home, try new things. When they falter, I hope they learn to keep getting back up. I hope my husband and I have taught them both the importance of repentance and forgiveness.
Over time, I have gained a different kind of empathy for my oldest brother. It is healthier now. I am learning forgiveness, not denial. Forgiveness sees no fairness; that measurement doesn’t exist.
My brother's story added a few more chapters to the prodigal son's narrative in our family.
In 2020, after roughly sixteen years in prison, he received another opportunity through probation. But again, it did not go well.
In the two years leading up to his parole, I was having nightmares. After two rejections, I confronted him about my fears. He reassured me of his sincerity and shared his excitement about the future. When he was finally granted parole, tears of joy welled up in my eyes. I immediately praised God.
This time, the weight of responsibility hit hard. I found myself doing things I never imagined I would have to do and taking stands on issues I once avoided. Old wounds reopened, and new ones were added. The knife went to the bone that time.
That reopening tested everything I thought I had already learned about forgiveness. What once would have sent me back into the field rehearsing speeches now sends me to the Father. As time passes, God continues to teach me faithfulness, forgiveness, and surrender.
Recently, my oldest brother rededicated his life to Christ.
Praise God!
Countless prayers have been said in the hope of that very outcome.
Today, I am still standing in the field, looking out.
The old reflex to say ‘That’s not fair’ still rises, but I am learning to nail those words to the cross rather than let them define the view.
I’ve learned that forgiveness isn't pretending my brother didn't hurt us.
Forgiveness is choosing not to let bitterness become my inheritance.
I can look across the field now; I don’t just see what was taken, but what was given, and I’m thankful for both. For years, I noticed the broken pieces. Now I get to witness healing.
When my brother was shot, I saw grace. I have never viewed that moment any other way. When my brother went back this last time, I saw myself break, and God put me back together, stronger. Situations that could have torn our family apart became places where God sustained us, healed us, and even created ministries from our pain.
God has been faithful to my family. To me.
Like the father in the parable, He has welcomed me back after my own seasons of wandering. I may have painted myself in a kinder light throughout this story, but I have had my own failures and squandering.
I will continue returning to the field, but now my attention is fixed more on my Father. I understand anger. I understand offense. Now I want to understand peace, compassion, and grace. I want to know my Father better.
He has allowed me to work through my frustrations in the field and still come home to His table. I have never felt unwelcome.
I am thankful for a Father who watched over my brother when no one else knew how.
For that, I am deeply grateful.
And what an honor it is to work in that field.
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