The Trouble With Running Away

The Trouble with Running Away

I ran away often as a child. For reasons it would probably take a solid year of therapy for us to unravel, my sister and I—both under the age of ten—invented a childhood game we called “running away from our boyfriends.” We didn’t have boyfriends or know anyone who did. Even so, we routinely ran away from ours.

The game began when we called up our boyfriends and told them we were leaving. Then we gathered our dolls, packed their clothes up in our tiny red pasteboard suitcases, and ran away. (Usually just down the hall.) There were several things wrong with this game. First, they were our boyfriends, not our husbands, but we had babies. Second, we always came back home only to leave again in a day or two.

I don’t have a red pasteboard suitcase anymore. Or any dolls. But I still feel that urge now and again to run. I just disappear, Houdini-like, from places or situations that find me feeling uncomfortable or out of place. If I can’t physically escape, I let silence make a moat around me, keeping risk or vulnerability at bay.

I would like to learn another way. Because the trouble with running away is that you never learn what happens when you stay. It could be something painful . . . or something exquisitely good. There are indeed times when removing yourself from danger is necessary, but running often means never risking the possibility that staying put might just be the greatest adventure of all.

In Jesus’ story of the Prodigal Son, the stay-at-home brother resented the runaway one. He couldn’t understand why he didn’t get more credit for staying put. Or why the runaway was welcomed with a feast. When he told his father how he felt, the old man reminded him: “All I have has been yours this whole time.” The young man could have pressed in and enjoyed what was his, but he did not. Even though he stayed, his heart was far away from his father’s.

Habits of the heart don’t change overnight. But stories can be rewritten, even one line at a time. So I’m resisting the urge to run, and learning to stay and love what has long been mine.

His father said to him, “Look, dear son, you have always stayed by me, and everything I have is yours.”

Luke 15:31