During the great depression of the 1930s, many men were out of work. This devastating situation caused many of them to leave home and families and set out across the country in search of jobs. Because they had no money and could not afford public transportation, some of these men traveled by hitching rides on railroad boxcars. This was dangerous business, not only because it was against the law, but often these men would hop on the trains by catching onto the boxcar ladders while the trains were moving. “Riding the rods” was another way the hobos, as they were called, would hitch a train ride. When a train was stopped, they would crawl onto the series of rods which hung underneath the boxcars between the floor and the tracks and ride along under there.
Since our family lived next to the train tracks, we saw many of these poor men in their wandering travels. One day while playing with neighbor children in our backyard, I remember watching a hobo try to catch onto a moving train. He slipped off the ladder and fell under the train. Mercifully his life was spared, but he was badly injured.
When the hobos got hungry, they would go to homes near the tracks, knock on the doors and beg for food. My mother never turned them away. She would fix them a meal, always putting a gospel tract in with the meal. One man asked for “meal,” and my mother brought him a plate of food, thinking he wanted lunch. “No, no,” he said. “I caught a fish down at the creek, and I just wanted a little cornmeal to put on my fish.”
Many of these wandering men found shelter under a railroad bridge about a mile from our house. They had a regular campsite there with fires to cook what food they could find or catch, and the bridge protected them from the weather.
Where the men were going or what became of them, we never knew. But we do know the outcome of a similar wanderer in a story with a happy ending that the Lord Jesus tells in the Bible in Luke chapter fifteen. The young man in this story had a nice home and a father who loved him, but the young man didn’t care about either his home or his father. He demanded that his father give him the inheritance that would have been his when his father died. When the young man got the money, he soon left his father’s house and went off to a country far away.
The young man wasted all his money on wild living. Soon a very severe famine developed in the country where he was living, and he ended up with no money, no friends and no food. He got a job feeding pigs and, because he was so hungry, he wished he could eat the leftover pig food.
This story Jesus told isn’t just about the young man who was like the hobos I remember; it’s about you and me too. We are sinners wanting our own way and not wanting God or His divine guidance to interfere in our lives. We are wasting our money and time on what we think is important. But a time will come when our God-given conscience will cause us to realize how empty and worthless it all has been.
And this is exactly what happened to the young man in the Bible story. It says, “He came to himself ” - his conscience began to work on his soul. He began to feel the guilt of his sins, and he was sorry for how shamefully he had treated his father who loved him so much. He came to realize that only his father’s love and the loving home he had left could satisfy his emptiness. He prepared a speech he would say to his father: “I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants.” And he started home.
I suppose all the way home he was worried about how he would be received. He didn’t need to worry. “When he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.” The son didn’t get to finish his speech because he was received and welcomed by his father as a son who “was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.”
Boys and girls, and grown-ups too, are you still wandering far away from God? Are you feeling the guilt of your sins? Come home to the Father who loves you so much that He sent His Son Jesus down to this world to die on Calvary’s cross for those sins. His arms are wide open to receive you, and He wants to claim you as His child, a child who is no longer missing. “As many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the [children] of God, even to them that believe on His name” (John 1:1212But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: (John 1:12)).
The young man was no longer a wandering hobo, like the men in our story. He was now safe and happy in his father’s house. Are you still wandering in this cold, empty world in your sins? Won’t you come home and receive the Father’s love and forgiveness?
ML-10/06/2002