S2 E9 Lost Sheep Series Let Them

You love them. You've tried everything. And you still don't know — do you keep reaching out or do you step back? Do you call again or does the silence say something they need to hear? Do you show up or does showing up push them further away?

In Part 2 of the Lost Sheep Series, Charlene Condu tackles the hardest question parents and partners face when loving someone who won't let them close: when do you go forward and when do you pull back?

Using the story of the Prodigal Son as a roadmap, Charlene unpacks one of the most misunderstood parenting strategies in Scripture — the father who let his son go. He didn't chase him to the pig farm. He didn't enable the destruction. But he never stopped watching the road. And the moment that boy turned around, his father was already running.

This episode will help you understand the difference between pursuing and pressuring, between keeping the door open and being a doormat, between loving fiercely and loving wisely. It will also speak honestly to what happens when you give everything and it still isn't enough — and how to keep going without losing yourself in the process.

This is not a failure manual. This is a battle strategy.

Thanks for listening to Me Again, God with Charlene Condu.
If today connected with you, I’d love to hear your story.

Visit: www.MeAgainGod.com

Email: MeAgainGodPodcast@gmail.com

Follow: Me Again God on social media

You’re not alone in this walk — we’re learning, growing, and coming back to God together, one episode at a time.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome back to Me Again God. I'm Charlene Condu. I'm your host. Now, welcome to part two of the Lost Sheep series. Last week we sat together in the hardest truth. That our children, the ones who have drifted, the ones who have gone cold, the ones who are aimed at us like weapons right now, they are not the villain. They are the mission. And we looked at them through the eyes of the shepherd who leaves the 99 to go find the one. I heard from so many of you after that episode, women who said, I needed someone to say that out loud. I needed permission to grieve this without feeling like I had failed. I needed to hear that I am not alone. You're not alone. We are still all in this together. But today we have to go somewhere harder because last week was about seeing your child clearly. This week is about figuring out what you actually do. And the questions that every single one of you asked, every parent, every partner, every woman who has tried to love someone who does not want to be loved right now is this. Do I keep going forward or do I pull back? Do I call again? Do I send another text? Do I show up on their doorstep? Do I keep making plans and buying plane tickets and reaching across the distance? Or does the silence say something they need to hear? Does my constant reaching make it too easy for them to keep pushing? Or is my pursuit part of the problem? That is the question we are answering today, and I want to warn you right now, the answer's not simple. It's not a formula, it's not a checklist you can run through and get a clear result every time, but it is in the word, and it is absolutely knowable with wisdom and prayer and the courage to be honest with yourself. So, like always, go grab your coffee because we're going in. I want to talk to you about the most famous lost sheep story in all of scripture, and I want to read it to you not the way you learned it in Sunday school, but the way it actually reads when you are when you're a parent watching your child walk away. It's Luke 15, the prodigal son. A young man goes to his father and says, Give me my inheritance. Now, while you're still alive, I don't want to wait. Okay, let's stop right there. Because do you understand what that request meant in that culture and probably ours too? And that time and place, asking for your inheritance while your father was still living was essentially saying, I wish you were dead. I want what I get if you were gone. I'm done waiting for you. That's not a rebellious teenager sneaking out at night. That is a direct, deliberate, devastating rejection. And what did the father do? He gave it to him. He didn't argue, he didn't guilt him, he didn't say over my dead body, or not until you can prove you're responsible, or after everything I've done for you. No. He gave him what he asked for. He let him go. Now I need you to sit with how hard that was. Because we romanticize this story. We skip to the running father and the robe and the ring and the party. But before any of that, there was a father who watched his son pack up and walk down the road and disappear, and he let him go. That was not weakness. That was the hardest kind of love there is. Because here's the truth that is that this story teaches us, and it is the truth that cuts right to the bone. You cannot force someone to want to come home. You can make it easy, you can make it safe, you can make it clear that the door is open and the light is on and they're wanted. But you cannot drag someone back who is not ready to turn around. And if you try, if you chase them to the pig farm and try to clean them up before they've decided they want to be clean, you will only push them further. The father in this story understood something profound about love. I mean real love. The kind that actually reaches people, requires freedom. A love that says you have to come back is not love. It is control. And control has never once brought a lost sheep home. So the father let him go. And then and this part I need you to see. The father went home. He did not fall apart, he did not stop living, he did not spend every day chasing the horizon. He went home. He kept the farm running, he kept his own life going, and he watched the road every day. Watching the road, not chasing, not pursuing, not calling out into the distance, just be present, available and ready. And when that boy was still a great way off, when he had just turned around, when he had just started the Walcom, the father saw him because he was watching and he ran. That's your model. That's the strategy in in one story. Let them go when holding on is only pushing them away. Keep your own life, your own faith, your own feet on solid ground. Watch the road. And when they turn, be ready to run. Some of you have heard of a book called Let Them by Mel Robbins. Maybe you've read it, maybe you've seen it all over social media. Maybe someone sent you a quote from it at exactly the right moment and it cracks something open. And if that's you, I want you to hear this. God put that exact concept in Scripture 2,000 years before Mel Robbins gave it a name. The father in Luke 15 did not need a bestseller to tell him that love sometimes requires that. He already knew. Let them choose, let them go. Let them feel the full weight of their own decisions, not because you don't love them, but because you cannot want their healing more than they want it for themselves. And here's the part that Mel Robbins got right, and that the prodigal son story confirms. Trying to want it for them is slowly destroying you. When you chase someone who is running, you're not just exhausting yourself. You are actually removing the very consequence that might eventually turn them around. The son in Luke 15 came to his senses in a pig farm, not in his father's living room, not in a conversation his father forced, in a pig farm. Alone with his own choices and the results. He came to himself. You cannot manufacture that moment. You cannot engineer it. You cannot love someone into it ahead of schedule. What you can do is let them and pray and watch the road. Now I know let them is a lot easier to say than it is to live. So let's talk about what it actually looks like. Okay, to get practical, let them go and watch the road sounds beautiful in a parable and absolutely excruciating in real life. So let's talk about what it actually looks like. There is a difference between pursuing and pressure. And if you're in the thick of this right now, you need to know the difference because one of them keeps the door open and one of them slams it shut. Pursuing looks like this a text on their birthday that says, I love you and I'm thinking of you. No agenda, no guilt, no follow-up text asking why they didn't respond, just I love you, and a full stop. Pursuing looks like sending a card on a holiday. Not a card full of everything you've been wanting to say for six months. Just a card that says, You matter to me, I'm here. Pursuing looks like showing up, where there is a genuine need, a crisis, an emergency, a moment where your presence is clearly appropriate and clearly welcome, and you show up without using it as an opportunity to relitigate the relationship. Pursuing looks like keeping yourself in their peripheral vision in a way that is warm, consistent, and completely without pressure. Now, pressuring looks like this. Following up a text with another text asking why they didn't answer the first one. Calling repeatedly, leaving voicemails that escalate in emotion, making every interaction about the state of relationship instead of just the relationship. Using family gatherings as ambush sites, showing up at events where they will be and cornering them for the conversation they've been avoiding, making them feel like there's no safe space, and that doesn't come with an agenda. Sending messages through other people, asking siblings, cousins, mutual friends to carry your words to them, using third parties to apply pressure by proxy, escalating your own emotional state as a strategy, more tears, more guilt, more do you know how much this is hurting me? Not because those feelings aren't real, they are absolutely real, but because using your pain as leverage is pressure dressed up as vulnerability. Here's a hard question you need to sit with. Which one have you been doing? And I ask that with zero judgment because I understand more than you know. When you love someone and they're pulling away, every instinct you have says go after them. Hold on tighter, don't let them go. The idea of stepping back feels like giving up. It feels like abandonment. It feels like you're choosing yourself over them. But what if stepping back is actually the most loving thing you can do right now? What if the relentless pursuit, however loving your intention, is the very thing keeping them from turning around? Sometimes the most powerful thing you can say to a lost sheep is, the door is open, and I'm not gonna stand here blocking it, demanding you walk through it. When you're ready, I'm here. And then go live your life. You go grow, you go get stronger, you go build the thing God has called you to build, you go be the woman God is making you into. Because when they finally turn around, and if you keep praying, keep the door open, and trust God with the rest, there is every reason to believe they will. The person they come home to matters. They need to come home to someone who is rooted, someone who is whole, someone whose life is a living invitation to something better than where they've been. You cannot be that person if you have spent every year of their absence falling apart. That brings me to something I feel strongly about. And I don't hear I don't hear it talked about enough in Christian circles when it comes to wayward children or difficult family relationships. You are allowed to have limits. I know, I know that feels like it's it contradicts everything. We're mothers, we're partners, we are women of faith. We love unconditionally, and unconditional love, we've been told, means you take whatever's thrown at you and you absorb it and you keep going back for more because that is what love does. But I want to show you something. Even if the prodigal's son story, even in that picture of radical, running, robe throwing love, the father had limits. He gave the son his inheritance when asked, but he did not go with him. He did not fund the second round of reckless living. He did not enable the destruction from a closer distance. He stayed home. He kept his own house in order. He watched from where he was, not from the pig farm. Unconditional love does not mean unconditional access. It does not mean unconditional enabling. It does not mean you are required to sit in the direct line of someone's destruction while they use you as a target. You can love your child with everything you have and still say, I will not allow you to speak to me that way. I will not participate in a relationship where I am constantly treated with contempt. I will not fund choices that are destroying you. I love you and I have limits. Those two things are not in conflict. They are actually the most loving combination you can offer. Because here's what happens when you have no limits. The child learns that they can treat you any way they want, and you will absorb it and come back for more. And that does not teach them love. It teaches them that you have no value. And a parent with no value in their own eyes is not a compelling reason to come home. But a parent who says, I love you fiercely, and I love myself enough to have standards, that parent is something worth coming home to. So let me ask you this: where are your limits right now? Where has a pursuit crossed into self-destruction? Where have you been absorbing treatment that you would never accept from anyone else because it comes from your child and you feel like you owe it to them to take it? You don't owe anyone the destruction of your own dignity, not even your child. And the most honest, loving, God-honoring thing you can do is maintain yours. I want to speak to the woman, to the women who have been at this for a long time. Not not months, years. The ones who have had the door open so long, the hinges have rusted, and you're starting to wonder if you imagine there was ever someone standing in the doorway at all. I get it. And I'm not gonna give you a false promise that if you just do the right things the right way, they will come back by Christmas. I don't know that. Only God knows that. And anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something. What I can tell you is this waiting is not nothing. Watching the road is not passive. Praying without ceasing for a child who doesn't know you're doing it, that is some of the most powerful spiritual work a human being can do. I think about Hannah in 1 Samuel. She wanted a child so desperately that she prayed until the priest thought she was drunk. She wept, she bargained, she poured her whole heart out before God. And the Bible says God remembered her. Think about that. God remembered her. Not God eventually got around to it, not God finally noticed, God remembered. As if she had been on his heart the whole time, as if he had been holding her request carefully, working something that she could not yet see. Moving pieces into place that would make the answer even more beautiful than she had imagined. Your child is on God's heart. Lamentations 325. It says the Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him. Good to those who wait. Not just good to those who get the answer quickly, but good to those who wait. So if you are in the long wait, I want to give you a few anchors for the road. Anchor one. Make peace with what you cannot control. You cannot control when they turn around. You cannot control whether they turn around. That is a truth that is almost unbearable to sit with. And it is still the truth. The sooner you release the timeline to God, the freer you will be to live fully in the waiting instead of putting your whole life on hold for a homecoming that may or may not be on your schedule. Anchor two, keep a record of grace. Write down every small sign, every moment where something softened, even briefly, every prayer that felt answered, even partially, every time they show up when you didn't expect them to, every text that came out of nowhere, these are not accidents. These are the the shepherd working. Keep the record so that on the hard days you have evidence that God is moving even when you cannot feel it. Anchor three. Celebrate who they are, not just who you want them to be. And this one's hard. But but one of the most healing things you can do in a fractured relationship is find genuine things to appreciate about who your child is right now. Not a future version, not who they were, but who they actually are today. When they feel genuinely seen rather than constantly measured against an expectation, something shifts. It may be slow, but it shifts. Really release them in prayer, maybe even out loud. Into the hands of the one who loves them even more than you do. That's not giving up. That's the most powerful act of faith a parent can perform. Okay. So what does it actually look like to watch the road to stay present and available without pressuring and pursuing? Here's some things that work. These are not guarantees, these are seeds. You plant them. You trust God with the harvest. Keep communication open but light. A text that requires nothing. A voice message that just says, I'm thinking of you today. Maybe a card in the mail. Because nobody sends mail anymore, and something physical carries a different weight than a notification on a screen. These are low pressure signals that say, I'm here. The door's open. There's no agenda. Show up for the big things when invited. If they invite you, or if there is a life event significant enough that your absence would be a louder statement than your presence, show up without commentary, without using the moment to address the relationship, just be there. Be warm. Be someone they're glad they led in the room. Stay interesting. This sounds strange, but stay with me. Keep growing, keep building, keep pursuing the things God has called you to. Have a life they might eventually want to be a part of. Be someone who has something to offer when they come back, not just a person who's been waiting in an empty house. The best advertisement for coming home is a home worth coming home to. Pray for their protection. Pray that the seed finds water. Name them. Every day by name. Take care of your own soul. Go to your Jesus jam. Stay in the word, stay in community, stay in worship. Because you cannot watch the road from a place of complete depletion. You need to be filled to stay in position. And staying in position, being rooted, being ready, being the person they can come to is your assignment right now. Don't punish them for not coming home sooner. And this one's critical. When they do reach out, when they do soften, even slightly, resist the urge to make them pay for the silence. Resist the urge to lead with how much it hurt. There will be a time for honest conversation, but the moment of return is not that time. The moment of return is for the robe, for the ring, for the running. Meet them where they are and let God handle the rest. I want to close today with an image I keep coming back to in this whole series. The father standing at the edge of his property every morning, eyes on the horizon, not frantically searching, not collapsing in grief, not chasing, just present, faithful, ready. That's the posture I'm asking you to take. Not passive, faithful. Not hopeless, watchful. Not chasing, but ready. Because here's what that father knew that his son did not know yet. The story wasn't over. The son thought it was over. He took his inheritance and he burned it to the ground and found himself in a pig farm thinking that's it. I've used up everything I was given. There is nothing left. But the father knew. The father kept watching the road because the father knew. I don't care how cold or angry or lost they seem right now. The father is still watching the road. And he's asking you to watch it with him. Next week, episode 10, the final episode of this Lost Seep series, we're suiting up. We're gonna talk about the most powerful thing you can do for a child you cannot reach by any natural means. We're gonna talk about prayer as warfare, about the armor of God as strategy, and not just as a metaphor, but what it means to fight for someone who's fighting against you and how to do it without burning out. So make sure you come ready, because episode episode 10 is it's it's gonna be everything. Until then, let's all just get up, get prayed up, and scripture up. Watch the road. I'll see you next week.