Fix my eyes

The Retune Blog - 8th March 2024

This Sunday is Mother’s Day and I’ll be speaking in church on the parable of the lost son. If you don’t know it, it’s a story about a son who asks for their inheritance, goes off to live it up large, runs out of money and finds themselves going back home broken. The twist is that they are welcomed back with celebration alongside the perhaps unexpected portrayal of the characters in the story.

But whenever I hear this story, it’s Mumford and Sons I Will Wait which comes instantly to mind:

Well I came home, like a stone.

It’s a song I’ve written about previously but one worth revisiting with a slightly different emphasis:

And fix my eyes. A tethered mind free from the lies.

In the story, the lostness is portrayed as the son's attraction to the bright lights of hedonistic living with a focus on his own individual pleasure. Yet there is also the older son, he ‘sensibly’ stays at home and doesn’t ‘squander’ his inheritance. Yet by the end of the story, it is apparent there is a lostness to his life too. A far more subtle form of being lost in which love, mercy and grace have been replaced with living life just by the perceived rules and expectations.

The lyric above speaks of a renewed focus on a mind that is willing to make its own decisions and live with integrity with compassion. In the story both sons have become lost to this idea, both living through a perceived idea of good or right living driven by something else.

What I love about this story is that it is so easy to see ourselves in both the sons. I know there are times when I might drift either way; towards a subtle legalism or individualistic self-indulgence. It’s never really to the extreme, and perhaps an easier way of considering this is between living with a focus on productivity or fun.

The great thing in this story is that getting it right is not the point. The point is that wherever we gravitate towards in terms of making our mistakes, what we always need to do is stop, refocus, and to learn to live life in love, mercy and grace.

And as I hear this story and song again this week, it’s this message which motivates me to refocus my life.

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