The Long Way Home to Love
I once was lost...
It’s been a year since my father died.
Our last family vacation together was a beach trip in the Philippines.
One afternoon, I took a kayak and paddled far out, circling an island just because I could. I felt strong, playful, alive.
What I didn’t know was that my dad had noticed and was worried for my safety.
He grabbed a kayak and raced out after me, fear and love propelling him across the water. When he reached me, he didn’t scold. He didn’t tell me I’d been irresponsible. He didn’t demand that I turn back.
He just asked how I was doing.
And then he stayed.
We floated there together on the open ocean, surrounded by beauty, side by side.
My dad was not a perfect man. He was complex and flawed. And still, he watched, he worried, he came toward me when I wandered.
I've been thinking about that moment ever since — how simply and clearly he showed me what true love looks like. And how much it mirrors a story Jesus tells that I thought I already knew.
It’s often called the Prodigal Son, though I’m not sure that title gets it right. The word prodigal means wasteful, reckless, extravagant — but the parable isn’t only about a reckless son who leaves. It’s about a father who watches, waits, and recklessly runs to bring his child home.
Hearing this story again at church last Sunday, I realized it’s an echo of my own life, both in the leaving, and in the being found.
Growing Up Inside the Story
I grew up inside a religious tradition, but not inside a relationship with God.
I was raised in the LDS (colloquially known as Mormon) Church. Growing up, that meant three hours of church every Sunday and an hour of scripture study every morning before high school, starting at six a.m. I knew the stories. I knew the rules and routines. I knew what faith was supposed to look like.
But I wasn’t really into it.
I went out of obligation. Out of loyalty to my parents. Out of a sense that this was what I was supposed to do. Very little of it felt alive or true to me. I didn’t feel internally convinced, and I didn’t feel relationally connected.
In the LDS Church, testimony is central. Once a month, there is testimony meeting—an open microphone where anyone can stand up and say what they know to be true. As a child and teenager, I did that sometimes, stood up and said the words everyone else said. I bore my “testimony.”
But the truth is, I didn’t actually have one.
I was repeating language I had inherited, not speaking from lived encounter. I didn’t know what the words meant in my body or my heart. Eventually, I stopped standing up—not out of defiance, but out of honesty. I didn’t want to say what I didn’t know.
As a young child, I’d felt flashes of connection, moments of God’s love in prayer or while reading my children’s Bible. Enough to know that something sacred existed. But those moments didn’t deepen as I got older. If anything, they receded. By my teenage years, I felt restless, skeptical, and increasingly rebellious.
I felt a strong need to go my own way. I read widely. I became deeply interested in meditation and philosophy. I began to see my parents’ faith not just as something that didn’t fit me, but as something irrational and foolish. I was prideful, arrogant, and judgmental. I thought I saw more clearly than they did. I thought they were delusional for being Christian.
The Rupture
At eighteen, my rebellion reached a breaking point.
Over Christmas break, after my first semester of college, I told my parents, with typical teenage callousness, that I wasn’t living by their rules, and was officially leaving the church. That landed hard. They were upset. There was fear, anger, conflict, grief. At first, they told me they wouldn’t pay my college tuition anymore.
And I said, fine.
If I couldn’t live honestly within their world, I would leave it.
So I did.
I didn’t just leave the church—I left. I dropped out of the Ivy League university I’d been attending. I left home. I began traveling and working on farms, moving constantly. For much of that first year, I barely spoke to my parents. We weren’t fully no-contact, but we were far. Distant. I was intent on proving, to them and to myself, that I didn’t need what they had given me.
That was the beginning of my long leaving.
In Jesus’ story, the younger son demands his inheritance early — a rupture so deep it’s like declaring his father dead. The father gives it to him anyway. The son takes everything and leaves.
I didn’t ask for an inheritance. But I took what I’d been given — the education, the stability, the religious tradition, the love — and walked away as though none of it mattered.
Wandering
On my own, I pursued salvation in the form of self-sufficiency. I studied permaculture and worked on small homesteads and farms. I lived out of a backpack. I trusted my own intelligence, my own discipline, my own insight. I believed that if I could understand reality clearly enough, I would finally arrive at peace.
I searched for love in ideas — stacks of Alan Watts and Krishnamurti on farmhouse floors, hours lost in teachings that promised liberation through insight and awareness alone. Endless looping arguments with lovers about non-duality and consciousness, as though we could think our way into intimacy.
I searched for love in relationships — mistaking physical closeness for the real thing, giving my body away in ways that left me more hollow than before. I stayed far too long in a deeply toxic relationship, in part because I was unconsciously asking another human being to be my source of love, to give me what only God can give, and was terrified of losing it.
I searched for love in practices — obsessively pursuing meditation, yoga, breathwork, disciplining my body and mind as though peace were something I could manufacture through effort.
Unmoored from my Source, I didn’t know how to be alone without collapsing, and I didn’t know how to be with someone without disappearing.
Beneath it all was a belief I couldn't yet see: that love was something I had to earn by being perfect. That if I made a mistake — if I was wrong about something, or hurt someone, or needed help — I would be disqualified, unlovable. So I never admitted fault. I constructed elaborate rationalizations to avoid acknowledging that I was doing anything wrong. I was terrified that others would see my brokenness and reject me.
At the time, I wouldn’t have called it a search for love, but that’s what it was.
Light through the Cracks
In the midst of my searching, I took LSD for the first time.
It felt as though a veil had been lifted from my eyes.
What came through was not chaos, but coherence. I could feel, viscerally, that all of creation was alive, ordered, intelligent. It wasn’t just beautiful; it was singing. The only word that made sense for what I was experiencing was God. Not as an idea, but as presence. As Love. As an intelligence woven through everything that exists.
I didn’t feel like I had discovered something new so much as remembered something ancient.
I could no longer honestly say that God was a delusional idea I had outgrown.
For many Christians, this is where the story gets uncomfortable.
Psychedelics carry associations with countercultural rebellion, spiritual deception, or at best, a shortcut to something that should be earned through prayer and discipline. I understand that discomfort. I don’t think psychedelics are the path for everyone, and I don’t think they’re a substitute for ongoing daily relationship with God.
But I had spent years fortifying myself against the God who was trying to reach me. Maybe that's why He came in through a door I didn't think to lock.
Over the five years that followed, as I continued to sit with psychedelics in solo ceremony, each journey brought me deeper — not into abstraction, but into specificity. Into God’s unconditional love. Into the truth of Christ. Into the staggering reality of Jesus’ sacrifice. Into Scripture not as moral myths but as living encounter.
I didn’t arrive at Jesus through reason. I was led back through encounter — through means the church doesn’t yet know how to integrate.
Something, some One, was beginning the long run to me with open arms.
But my life hadn't caught up to what my eyes had seen.
The Wearing Down
Even after that opening, I was still entangled in the life I’d built.
In Jesus' parable, the son eventually finds himself so destitute that he's feeding pigs — the lowest, most unclean work an ancient Jewish person could imagine. There is no thunderbolt. No moral lecture. Just the quiet realization in the depths of hunger and humiliation:
This isn't working.
Even my father's servants live better than this.
In 2018 I was living and working on a small pig and veggie farm in North Carolina, caught in a confusing quasi-polyamorous relational situation that left me chronically disoriented and depleted.
I remember one afternoon, crying in the field as I harvested lettuce alone, realizing:
Oh.
This isn’t working.
I need to go home.
Being Received
When I did finally return home, my parents welcomed me back with open arms.
They didn’t interrogate me. They didn’t require an explanation. I stayed with them for six months. I slept. I ate real meals. My nervous system settled. It wasn’t a full reconciliation yet—but it was safety.
In the parable, the son rehearses an apology on the walk home. He’s ready to beg, to offer himself as a servant. But the father sees him from far off and runs to meet him. He doesn’t wait for the explanation. He doesn’t ask where the money went. He embraces him before a single word of the speech is spoken.
My parents didn’t need my explanation either.
They had never stopped loving me while I was gone.
My dad wrote me emails while I was traveling. He came to visit me on a farm in Hawaii. My mom walked in high heels down a muddy road to come see a farm where I was living, coming straight from a bank board meeting into my unconventional life, compost toilets and all.
At the time, I didn’t fully understand what that meant.
I do now.
This, Jesus says, is what God is like.
This is what True Love is like.
Not a parent who waits for you to get it right. Not a parent who demands an accounting. A parent who scans the horizon, and the moment you turn — before you've found the words, before you've cleaned yourself up — runs to you.
The Long Return to God
From 2018 onward, my return was slow and cautious.
I began reading about Jesus again. Watching The Chosen. Studying, exploring, gently. I sensed there was something in the tradition I had grown up with that I had missed—something relational, something alive.
In 2023, everything changed.
I was at a Somatic Experiencing training, in a session with a practitioner who wasn’t Christian and wasn’t trying to lead me anywhere spiritually. But in a moment, as we slowed down and explored my wounds around being seen, something in me knew that it was time to invite Jesus fully into my life.
When I did, I was met.
The presence of Jesus was so clear, so immediate, that it cracked me open. There was a Person standing behind me, his hand resting on my shoulder, looking at me with the most devastating love and care.
My body responded before my mind could catch up. It felt like being overloaded with an electric charge — pure energy, something like awareness, like love, like power, but altogether more than any of those words and totally unnamable. I felt fully seen, fully known, down to the atoms of my being. I was thrown into seeing how terrified I had been of my own desires — how many layers of rationalization I had constructed to avoid what was true. Every defense was illuminated.
And none of it was rejected.
For five days after, I could barely eat or sleep. My life reorganized around that encounter. I ended the three-year relationship I was in. I started to pray out loud. I returned to church.
I entered a relationship with God.
When I returned to church, the path wasn't a straight line. I spent a year at a mystical, earth-rooted Episcopal parish that helped me remember that Christianity has its own contemplative depths. Then a year church-hopping — searching for a community that could hold both honest inquiry and genuine commitment.
I've landed at a non-denominational church that feels like solid ground: a place to ask hard questions, to build real relationships, and to do the slow work of becoming Christ's in community, not just in private revelation.
The Source of True Love
Looking back, I can see that all my wandering was a search for love.
I tried to generate it through insight.
Secure it through relationships.
Prove myself worthy of it through effort.
What I didn’t yet understand was this:
Love cannot be produced.
Love cannot be earned.
Love must be received.
When God became the source of love in my life, everything else found its place, including human love.
This is what makes the depth of my relationship with my fiancé possible. Not because we love each other perfectly, but because we are not asking each other to be love’s primary source.
Our closeness surfaces fear. It exposes old wounds. It activates nervous systems that want to flee or control. It can be frightening and intense.
But we stay.
We stay with the intensity. We tell each other the truth about what we’re afraid of and what we want. With time, I am learning to own my mistakes, to own my desires, to release the belief that I must be perfect to be loved.
Neither of us is carrying the impossible weight of being the other’s ultimate security. We know only God can offer the perfect security we really need.
We’re two people oriented toward a love bigger than either of us, sharing and trusting what we’ve already received.
That knowledge doesn’t make love easy. But it makes it free.
It makes room for risk. For depth. For intimacy without clinging and devotion without demand — and for the slow, stunning work of turning our wounds into deeper love.
I couldn't love like this before God found me. Not because I've perfected anything — but because I've stopped believing I have to.
My Testimony
As a child, I spoke in those church testimony meetings with nothing true to say. Now I do.
I know, in every cell of my body, that God loves each of us completely, patiently, unconditionally. That there is nothing I can do to make myself unlovable.
I was loved while I was leaving. I was pursued while I was hiding. And when I finally turned around, covered in the dust of everything I’d gotten wrong, I wasn’t asked to clean myself up before I could be held.
God doesn’t wait to love us until we've returned and repented and gotten our lives together. God loves us precisely in our brokenness — while we're still in the far country, still feeding pigs, still rehearsing our excuses. The embrace comes first. Before the apology. Before the explanation. Before we've earned a thing.
I know that God poured Himself out into the person of Jesus, taking on and transforming our suffering, our shame, our pain—not reluctantly, but with the same reckless love as a father sprinting to meet his child.
I was lost for a long time. Now, embraced by a prodigal grace I don’t have to earn, I know I am found.
Life hasn’t become easy. But I build my foundation on something unshakable: a peace not of this world, a love closer than my own breath.
The Greatest Love Story
I’m sharing this story because I know how many people are wandering.
Some are wandering through ideas.
Some through relationships.
Some through spiritual practices.
Some through work, achievement, or self-mastery.
Beneath all of it, there is the same longing: to be loved.
If you see yourself anywhere in this story—leaving, searching, striving, exhausting yourself—please know:
You are not disqualified.
You were not wasting time.
You were looking for love.
And it has been running toward you this whole time.
On Valentine’s Day, we talk a lot about love—romantic love, human love, fragile love. But there’s a bigger love I’m pointing to here: love that does not demand you earn it, love that does not disappear when you leave, love that watches the horizon and runs toward you the moment you start to return.
This is the love at the heart of the prodigal story.
This is the love that found me.
On the waves, my father saw me from across the water and raced to reach me. In my spiritual wandering, my Father saw me from across the years and never stopped chasing after my heart.
If you are far from home right now, even if you are farther than you think you could possibly return from, Love is already running towards you.
You don’t have to earn your way back.
True love is not afraid of the long way home.
If something in this story stirred you and you want to explore more deeply, I’d love to support you. I offer one-on-one somatic & spiritual space to slow down, heal old patterns, listen deeply, and align your life with the sacred—so you can be more fully present in your relationships, your work, and your connection to the Divine.
You can begin the conversation here.
Speech. Less. I can relate to so much... literally down to the places traveled to, the farm work, the escaping through practices and relationships... thank you for sharing 🙏♥️
Beautiful. ❤️