The older son

Leaving

Standing with clasped hands:

• Exterior lostness and Interior lostness.
• Elder son did want him back.

Lost in resentment:

• Complaints make obedience and duty a burden, and service has become slavery.
• It is not about staying in the home but living in it.
• Frozen anger.

Without joy

• It is the complaint that comes from a heart that feels it never received what it was due.
• Unspoken complaint.
• Inner complaint:  condemnation of others and self-condemnation, self-righteousness and self-rejection.
• Complaining is self-perpetuating and counterproductive.
• Complaint = further rejection.
• Joy and resentment cannot coexist.
• To be embraced is to be in the house.

An open-ended question

• One of life's hardest spiritual choices:  to trust in God's all-forgiving love.
• Cold anger.

Returning

A possible conversion:

• The father wants his sons to be themselves.
• The father's love is not dependent upon an appropriate completion of the story.
• The father's love is only dependent on himself and remains part of his character.
• Beyond all evaluations, The father moves directly to stress his intimate relationship.
• The unreserved, unlimited love of the father is offered wholly and equally to both his sons.

Letting go of rivalry:

• The return from false dependence and from my complaining, comparing, resentful self to my true self.

Through trust and Gratitude:

• The resentment is the bitter fruit of their needs to please.
• Trust and gratitude are the disciplines for the conversion of the elder son.
• Trust is the deep inner conviction that the father wants me home.
• Self-complaint can make me totally deaf to God's voice.
• Disown my self-rejecting voice and claim the truth.
• Gratitude:  the opposite of resentment.
• Gratitude claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift.
• Gratitude is a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, also the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love.
• Gratitude involves a conscious choice.
• Choose gratitude over complaint.
• The leap of faith always means loving without expecting to be loved in return.
• To leap is to glimpse

The true elder son:

• To believe in Jesus means to believe that he is the one sent by the Father, the one in and through whom the fullness of the Father's love is revealed.
• He is sent by the Father to reveal God's unremitting love for all his resentful children and to offer himself as the way home.