THE PRODIGAL SON--AN AMERICAN EXPERIMENT

Have you ever noticed how you can read a passage in the Bible at one time, then read the same story years later and notice something new? I got a little insight into that last week. My Sunday school teacher, Al, tried an interesting experiment on us.

Al is always researching and read about an experiment a missionary conducted. The missionary notice that Americans, usually left out a specific fact from a very common Bible story. Al tried the experiment on us and we acted just as anticipated.

We were each asked to summarize the Parable of the Prodigal Son, a story we were familiar with, Luke 15:11-32. The story is about a wealthy man and his 2 sons. The youngest wants his share of the inheritance before his father is death. He leaves the family and lives lavishly until he runs out of money. He returns to beg his father to work as a servant, but the father is so happy to see the son that he has a celebration. The faithful brother is jealous of the father's attention, but the father reassures him and explains that they should all rejoice when the prodigal returns.

As we each retold the story, Al smiled and we knew something was up. When it was over Al explained that most Americans leave out one fact to the story that people in many other countries find very important. The Bible says that there was a famine in the land.None of us remembered that fact but it is clear in Luke 15:14. We all looked it up.

It seems that older Americans that have experienced the Dust Bowl Era, do pick up on the verse about the famine, but if we haven't experienced one, that doesn't seem like a significant detail.

I guess that tells a lot about how we read the Bible. Things we've experienced do seem to jump out at us.

The older I get, the more relevant the Bible seems. I've had more life experiments.