Among his list of "Voyage and Return" plots, Booker also identifies Jesus's parable of the Prodigal Son. He describes the parable as many of us understand it. The younger son demands his inheritance, travels to another country, squanders his money until he has nothing left, and finally decides to come home again pleading for mercy. When told or heard like this, it is a story fitting neatly into Booker's category, and perhaps neatly into our understanding of faith. Journeys to faith and to the Father are often stories of coming and going and returning again.

But is this an accurate understanding of the parable of Jesus? Is the story of the prodigal son really about the son? Is our membership in the body of Christ about ourselves or Christ himself?

My story of life as a Christian cannot be told without some admittance of wandering to and from faith, in and out of God's will, walking with and without the Son. When I think of my place in the Christian assembly, the body of Christ, or the great cloud of witnesses, I am immediately aware of my wandering heart and less than perfect role in the story. I imagine my place in the assembly as I might image entering a grand ballroom of crowned guests and beautiful robes only to realize I am wearing a t-shirt and old jeans. The greater body of Christ--with its martyrs from early centuries and saints from our churches today--does not seem like a place in which I readily belong. Of my place in the great cloud witnesses, sometimes I feel more like humorist Groucho Marx, who once declined the offer of membership into an organization with the reply: "I don't care to belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member." If I myself am the main character, this is the story I must tell.

Thankfully, I am not. And Jesus's parable of the prodigal son is one more reminder of this. The parable of the prodigal son is only a "voyage and return" narrative in the way Booker describes it if the son is the main character of the story. But any study of the father in this story makes that an unlikely theory. Jesus tells us that it was while the son was still "a long way off" that the father saw him and "was filled with compassion for him" (Luke 15:20). Literally, this father was moved by this compassion. The Greek word conveys an inward movement of concern and mercy, but this man was also clearly moved outwardly. The father runs to the son, embraces him (literally, "falls upon his neck"), and kisses him.

Jesus describes a scene far more abrupt and shocking than the story we often remember of the son who wanders away and returns home again. It is not the wayward son who runs to the father but the father who runs to his wayward son, and at that, without any assurance of his son's repentance. In fact, the father runs without any promise that the son is even home to stay. It is not the son who we find kneeling in the story Jesus tells, but the father. It is as if he is reminding us once again that all have indeed fallen short of the glory of God, but God has fallen to pick us up again and again, and to bring us home. Jesus gives us a story whose merciful ending has far more to do with the actions of the father than the actions of the son.

So it is with our own stories. Our place in the body of Christ, our membership in the great cloud of witnesses is valid not because of who we are, but because of who Christ is. If we must use Booker's headings to describe the journey of faith, the voyage was Christ's, so that we might forever return to the Father.

Jill Carattini is senior associate writer at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia. "Voyage and Return" by Jill Carattini, A Slice of Infinity, originally printed 13 July 2007 (www.rzim.org). Used by permission of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.