A village shopkeeper, who knows we keep birds at our house, stopped me one day in May and gave me a box containing a baby starling, its eyes barely open, a few fuzzy feathers dotting its gray skin. Home it went, and my wife began the arduous task of twice-hourly feedings, first with pureed goo from a syringe, later with live crickets held with tweezers.

The bird thrived and grew to full size in three weeks. "Ali Baba" was the name we gave her, but mostly called her "Stinky" as she became a loud and mischievous member of the family. When allowed out of the aviary she followed us everywhere.

She was too clever in the end--one day she picked her way through three layers of netting and escaped to the great outdoors. Erika was heartbroken to lose her pet and sick with worry about new and unknown dangers like cats and cars.

Her fretting gave me a new picture of Jesus' parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32). The Bible story shows the father letting his son go without comment; if he worries during his son's absence it happens offstage, so to speak--we don't see it. But his reaction at his son's return---"He was lost and is found, he was dead but now is alive!"---reveals the anguish he had endured.

God loves us with just such a fierce love, and suffers to see us lost and wandering. For we areall prodigals at some times. Perhaps even the little summer escapes we so cherish can inadvertently lead us away from God, especially when they separate us from his family, our church.

Without proof but in great hope, I imagine Stinky the starling now truly at home with a new family of her own kind, mastering the ways of the wild, flying above the treetops, free as she could never be in a human house. For us, though, true freedom is not 'out there' in the world where prodigals indulge themselves, but here in God's house where we are embraced by the Father. Prodigals, welcome home to where our spirits soar.