A Downward Turn

When a son or a daughter starts heading in a direction different from the way he or she was raised, parents rightly become alarmed.

Craig Svensson knows something about this. He was the father of a prodigal. It's an incredible burden when you see your child making destructive choices. And it's very difficult to watch.

It's so painful. You just want to try to get them on the right road. But you know, when you have a prodigal in your family, it is so absorbing that it's easy to neglect your other children, because so much time and energy has to be poured into a prodigal. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Anne Wilson.

I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at familylifetoday.com. What should parents do when a son or a daughter is starting to make destructive choices? I mean, beyond praying, what do we do? We'll talk more about that today. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. We are stepping into a subject that is going to be a pain point for a lot of our listeners. And it's a pain point to revisit some of what we're going to hear about today. And it will be very relatable for many. Yeah, I mean, you can say one word and it evokes emotion, prodigal.

Just say the word and you have a whole array of thoughts and feelings and emotions. Craig Svensson is joining us on Family Life Today. Craig, welcome to the program.

It's a delight to be here. Craig lives in Indiana. He is a part of- That means he's a Hoosier. I went to college in Indiana.

I appreciate Hoosiers. And speaking of college, Craig is on the faculty at Purdue University and teaches pharmacology, right? Correct. Craig has been married for 36 years, father of three. And we're going to talk about one of your kids today and about this chapter in your life and in your marriage because you've written a book called The Painful Path of a Prodigal. And what we're talking about, this painful experience, is something that you and your wife never expected you would be going through but found yourself in the middle of about 15, 20 years ago, right? Correct. When did you start to look at each other and say, we have a child who's not just acting out but somebody who is strongly self-willed who I'm not sure how he's doing?

Yeah, I would say probably that was late elementary school. You know, a prodigal doesn't become a prodigal overnight. There are serious heart issues there that develop over time. You have no idea where it's going to go when things start turning south.

And obviously it just causes your prayer to drive up. But for us, probably the big downturn started when our son Eric turned 15. And that's when he began a very deep descent into drug abuse and all of its associated problems that come with that. So 12 to 15, what were you observing then that really was the bud that was not yet flowered as a prodigal? I think first and foremost, it was an unwillingness to seek God and his will and his life and a rebellion against those things.

And it was a desire to fulfill his pleasures and not sacrifice those pleasures for anything else. That's always a warning sign, right? So you're seeing that at 12 or 10?

Yeah, I would say those signs. Paint a picture for us of your family growing up. Where did he fit in? He's the youngest of three. At the time that he began his rebellion, our oldest was out of the house. He's considerably older.

He's 10 years older than him. So it was really just himself and our daughter who is 17 months his senior. So it was really the four of us in the household at that time. And what were you seeing at 12 and 13 when you say he's wanting to act out and satisfy his own pleasures? Do you remember a conversation with your wife where you said, we've got to try to fix this, we've got to step in, intervene, do we need counseling, those kinds of conversations? Well, I think in most children it probably shows up in school because they spend so much of their time in school. And it was issues that arose in school of not wanting to submit to authority, of acting out in school, of doing things that were obviously disruptive in the classroom and outside the classroom, getting into mischief.

And when you see a consistent pattern of that, then you begin to worry and say, all right, this is more than just an occasional phenomenon. What's going on in his heart here and struggling with him there? And you had had two older kids that you didn't see this going on? Yeah, certainly our daughter who was the closest to him was probably the polar opposite of that. She came out of the womb wanting to obey and has always remained that way.

So there was such a tremendous contrast there between the two of them whose life experiences were so close in time and therefore so much of what they experienced in terms of our parenting, what they experienced in our church, what they experienced in school was so identical because they're so close in age. Do you think her compliance was a factor in his desire to be different, to be his own person? No, I think it was his draw to sin and that's ultimately really what it is when someone enters into rebellion, right? It is because they are drawn to sin rather than the things of God. And really that's the natural path of us all. We have a sin nature. David said, behold, I was born in iniquity and sin did my mother conceive me. The wicked go astray from the womb we are told.

The real remarkable thing is that anyone follows Jesus. So the natural path is the path of rebellion and it's only when God does a work of grace in the heart of a child that you see them going a different path. What kinds of conversations were you having with your son in these early days when there were behavior issues at school and you're trying to intervene and get him back on the right track? Was he responsive to what you were saying or was he tuning you out?

I think probably varied with the day. There were times when he would listen and we would certainly, we had him involved in youth group and all those other activities, very involved in Sunday school. He was also involved in extracurricular activities that you might think would build his character. Tried to spend some time through Proverbs with him, which is a great resource for parents to point children to what the natural consequences are of certain types of behavior. And certainly he saw those things and you could see there was a struggle. I don't think at that age I would call him just open full bore rebellion.

He would have his good times and his bad times, but we could tell that he struggled with self-control and being able not to respond in anger or not taking advantage of a window of opportunity for mischief, that he would seize it was his tendency. And I think as parents we all go through stages with our kids and we're hoping and we're thinking, is this just a stage? I think because our kids go up and down and they're kind of all over the place, was there a point even that your wife thought this has gone on a little longer than we had anticipated? I think for us when we discovered him involved in drug use at the age of 15, that was a critical turning point.

And literally what happened is I walked outside of our garage and went to the side of the house. I was looking for him to call him for dinner and he was at the side of the house smoking a marijuana joint. First of all, that was our first clear indication that he was using drugs. Secondly, I have enough of a background to know when a kid is using drugs alone and in isolation, that's a real serious concern.

Most drug use takes place in a social setting, but when you've got a kid using a drug by themselves, you know you've got a very significant problem going on. So what happened? You walk around and see him. It was an interesting moment in his life because despite everything that was going on, he had an association with some detectives in the police force in our area. And they actually used him as a shopper to go into convenience stores, gas stations to try to buy cigarettes. Because he was 15, he was underage, to see if they cart him. So the police would take him and he would go in and if he came back out with cigarettes, then they went in and gave him a citation. So he had this relationship with two police in our local police department. Did you know that? Oh, yeah.

Oh, okay. I mean, obviously they got our permission to be able to do that and everything. So one of the first things we did is we called the police and talked to them about, not to arrest them, but to say, I'm not sure you want him doing this. And also maybe you would be good people to talk to him. And they actually came and spent, oh, I don't know, it was over an hour sitting at our picnic table in the back and talking with Eric and trying to really show him the path that he was likely going down. Obviously, he had to stop serving that role for them as a shopper. They didn't want someone like that. And there were a couple of times over the next year or so that they reached out to him.

And numerous people throughout his life in the difficult times that he went through were grateful for that reached out and tried to draw him back to a road that was not destructive. He's 15 at this point? He was. Had he been spoken for a while or?

No, it seemed to have been pretty quick. You know, it's always hard when you catch a child like that to know how much they're telling you the story. Of course, we asked all those logical questions, where, who'd you get it from, all that kind of stuff. And he didn't want to answer us.

And even if he answered us, I'm not sure we would have gotten honest answers at that time. In the moment when you walk out and see him smoking a joint and were you sure it was marijuana as opposed to a tobacco cigarette? You could smell it? Yeah, yeah, I could tell the difference.

All of a sudden, this is taking you completely by surprise. Did you become angry? How did you process it and how did you interact with him? Well, I think there was a big moment of silence between the two of us because we realized that a bridge had been crossed. You know, me acknowledging seeing him. And I just told him, come on inside now. And we sat down and said, why don't you talk to mom about what just happened?

And let him converse in his own words that way. Was there remorse on his part? I think remorse at getting caught. Yeah. Not remorse at what he had done.

Yeah. Did your wife respond any different than you did? I think that her biggest response was disappointment. You know, because again, it was just another step down the road and realizing this is a really serious step.

And what does that portend for the future? And so later that night, after he's gone to bed and the two of you are laying side by side in bed and going, what are we doing? Where do we go from here? What do we do next?

And that's always the challenge when you're asking a question about your child who is clearly on a path. Do we need outside help? Where do we go? How seriously do we take this?

Because at the same time, you can take a single instance and blow it up to something bigger than it really is. And we want to be careful thinking that through. And that's what really led us to call the police who he had worked with. They needed to know anyway, but we thought, you know, this is a good place. They've obviously been down this road with other young people before. They've been involved in interventions. And we hope that that would have been helpful for him to hear it from them. And walking through the consequences of where this could lead to.

Yeah. They were very kind. It wasn't like they were threatening to him or anything. They were just very kind. They were trying to communicate to him their concern for him.

They got like him, having worked with him now for a period of time. And they just tried to provide warning without really providing threatening for him. But it just didn't go anywhere for him. I mean, did Eric respond like, okay, I made a mistake.

I need to stop this. Or did he, was he defiant or, you know, what was his response? It was actually more placid than maybe I would have expected when that happened. He wasn't really particularly angry with us.

He wasn't, no, I don't want to go down that road anymore. It was just kind of placid and more nonresponsive than anything else, to be honest with you. It sounds like I'm thinking of a 15-year-old who's been caught. A placid response seems to me like, I've got to figure out how to manage this better.

Could be. So that mom and dad aren't up in my grill. And clearly the side of the house is not the place to go if you want to smoke a joint.

You've got to figure out how to be a little farther away from mom and dad. Did he continue with what he was doing immediately, do you think? Yes, yes. And in fact, much more in depth, very quickly. His drug use escalated and problems at the school that he was at also escalated very rapidly. And it came to a point where the school was just very concerned and we were as well. And at that point in time, we'd already done a little bit of counseling. You had asked about that previously. We'd done a little bit of counseling with him and realized something like that probably wasn't going to be enough.

And we decided that a more significant intervention was going to be necessary. So we decided to put him into an explorer type program, an outward bound kind of program. It's a wilderness camp that you go specifically for children that are going through serious rebellion, may or may not be drug use. And we actually got permission from the school to have him leave early and go into that camp early. And he spent, I guess it was about a little bit more than three months in a camp like that in Canada. How old was he? We were living in Michigan. At the time.

And so it was the end of that school year. And put him into that environment to try to help him to come to make better decisions, realize the path he was going on. His anger issues were rising and getting more severe and more serious and also to try to address those. So he goes away for three months. Were you talking to him? Any communication?

Or is he on his own? Our communication was in writing because they were in a pretty isolated area on an island. So you couldn't exactly escape, if you will.

You couldn't get your telephone there or anything. But we would write back and forth. And his letters were mixed. He didn't go fighting. He didn't fight it. He went, I guess I would say resigned to this is what's going to happen. He realized he was getting in more and more difficulty in school and that that path wasn't going very well either.

So he went fairly resigned to this kind of intervention. You said his drug use had escalated. He'd gone from marijuana into other drugs. At that point in time, we're not sure that he used other drugs.

We just used marijuana much more. And the group he was hanging out with, I guess, was a group that this is what their life was all about. Did you think about, we've got to pull him out of school, we've got to transplant him someplace else, get him away from this contagion group that he's a part of?

Yeah, we did certainly think about that. That's not really easy to do, as you can imagine. You can't just pick your kid up and go to another school. And because of his difficulties, a lot of schools obviously would not take him. A lot of private Christian schools, for example, wouldn't take a kid who's getting in trouble.

And at the time he was in a public school. What happened at that time, though, the Lord just seemed to open the door for when he came out of the residential program for us to change environments completely. We actually, while he, when he went off to this camp, we put our house up for sale. We were living in a suburb north of Detroit, and we were going to move to the west, figuring get him in a completely different school system, a different environment, but yet it was close enough for me to still get back and forth to the university. We did that, and in the midst of that, another university approached me and said, hey, we'd like you to consider coming to our university and to make a move and come be with us.

They wanted me to be a division head and stuff. It seemed like the Lord was opening the door, right, to be able to, when he came out of that camp, completely change his environment. And so we literally moved a week after he got out of camp and moved to Iowa, where I took a position at the University of Iowa, thinking that this will be a really good chance for a start. And the people in our church were just wonderfully supportive and praying for us, and everybody around us said, boy, this seems like God is really doing a great work here, opening a door to completely change Eric's environment from when he comes back. Talk about the people in your church, because here you guys are active in a local church. You've got all your friends are church folks.

Your kid's going off to an Outward Bound program because he's using substance abuse. This is the kind of thing you don't want to talk to friends at church about, or it's not comfortable to talk to friends at church about. Yeah, and I was actually serving as the interim preacher for this church. They were looking for a pastor, and I served as their intern for three years.

So it also presented a challenge, okay, should I step down in this role at this moment? I wasn't, I use the term interim preacher because of Eric's Rebellion, I wasn't willing to take on a position of ruling authority. So I wasn't the interim pastor. They had a group of elders, and the elders fulfilled the roles that you would think of for an elder. My role was really just to do the preaching, and I would do baptisms and communion and other types of things that were in the public ceremony and leading in those. But so it was a particular challenge whether my role should change because of what he was going through. And I can say that overall at that church, the support of the people was for the most part wonderful. Everybody knew what was going on with Eric's? Oh, I don't know if everybody knew, but it was, people recognized and it was pretty well known, and certainly the elders did because as things were evolving, I met with the elders and said, hey, this is the situation, maybe you ought to think about having somebody else step in this role.

And they said, no, no, as long as you feel like you can do it, we want you to stay there and continue to do that role. And so I would say the elders and key people in the church were just very supportive and very helpful of us at times. We hadn't always experienced that at a previous church we were at when Eric's rebellion was really starting. We experienced our share of being judged by others because of his rebellion. I'm thinking about your wife as you guys are laying in bed at night praying for, I'm sure, your son, but the emotional highs and lows, like your fear of what could this lead to, but then the hope of, okay, he's getting help, this is going better, I'm hoping that God's going to grab his heart.

What did that look like for you guys? And as a woman, I carry that constantly. And I'm guessing your wife did too. She certainly did, and it's an incredible burden when you see your child making destructive choices, and it's very difficult to watch.

It's so painful. You just want to try to get them on the right road, but you know that God has to do the work in their heart. And so it drives you to your knees in prayer, and you plead with God again and again and again, and just ask him to intervene. We were grateful that there were some men who also recognized and tried to pour themselves into Eric, sought to be a mentor. As you know, sometimes a child gets to a point they don't want to listen to mom and dad anymore, right? And one of the beauties of the body of Christ is that there are others who they may have relationships with who can come surround them and try to support.

And we had some of that, and we're very, very grateful for that. Were your other kids involved at all, wondering and asking you questions? Well, our daughter was the only one that was living at home, and I wouldn't say she gave us advice on what she'd do. She obviously was concerned about her brother. But one thing I'll tell you I wish that I had been more sensitive early on about was just how much it was impacting her life.

And I think when you have a prodigal in your family, it is so absorbing that it's easy to neglect your other children because so much time and energy has to be poured into a prodigal that you can forget about how it's impacting their lives. And certainly it made a difference about her wanting to have other people over at the house because she didn't know how he would act out and what he would do. It was embarrassing to her at school because she had a brother who others knew was going off in this very dangerous direction. So she had her own struggles. I don't want to speak with her for what her feelings were about that. But we recognize that this is a trial for her, not just for the parents.

It's also a trial for her. How about for your own marriage? Because I know in our home, when there's something going on with our kids... I blame Dave. You don't blame me. I'll blame her. I mean, there's just tension. Even if we agree, still there's this big thing going on, and there's pressure. And so it affects our marriage.

How is it affecting yours? I can remember being in bed at night and I'm saying to Dave, like, so-and-so is not in a good place. I'm worried about what he's doing right now out with his friends. And then Dave would say, he's a great kid.

He's not doing anything. And she was always right. Yes, he was. That's a sort of smile moment in our marriage. But there were tense moments, disagreements about what we should do, how do we handle this.

Was there any of that going on? Well, certainly there's a tension that gets created. And I think as he went deeper and deeper into drug use and all the consequences, that tension is only greater because you're living with this fear of what's going to happen next. But fortunately, we more leaned into one another than leaned away from one another.

And we were mostly of one mind. But there's no question that a prodigal is going to bring a tremendous amount of tension into a marriage. And it's why one of the priorities when you're walking this kind of trial is to make sure you're building on your marriage because it is going to be stressed by having a prodigal. And one of the things that's so important is that you come to an understanding that you may not always agree on what should be done, but you have to agree on what will be done.

And you have to speak with one voice. There were times when we might not agree with something that my son had asked, something he wanted, whether we should help him here, let him do this, et cetera. And there were times I would say to myself, okay, I don't agree, but we'll do what you said, and I'll trust your motherly instincts on this one.

There are other times maybe I would feel strongly we would do what I would say, but we would always present a united front. I mean, one reality is that prodigal children can really drive a wedge between a husband and a wife trying to get what they want. I mean, we all experience that with little kids. A little kid comes up, well, Mommy said I could. Well, Mommy didn't really say that, right?

Correct. And when they get older, they can become very skilled at playing parents off of one another to get what they want. And it's hard to think of your children acting that way, but they do, and you have to be aware of that. And so we worked hard to make sure we always had a unified voice.

We would have one voice, this is what we've decided. And we would never share that, well, I don't really agree with what Mom or what Dad says. You never want to go there and give them a tool to be able to drive a wedge between you. Well, one of the things we say at the weekend to remember, actually on Friday night as we're stepping into the weekend with married couples and pre-married couples, is five threats to your oneness. Every marriage is headed toward isolation or oneness. And I don't know which threat it is, Bob.

I've only done this for 30 years. But I don't even know how we say it, but it's basically that adversity or trials. Inevitable difficulties. Inevitable difficulties are going to come into your marriage, and I always say this, trials will make you better or bitter, and the choice is yours. And so we all know couples, we know families that have become bitter, even maybe broken up the family for whatever, could be a prodigal, could be a, you know. And then we know others went through the same thing, and they seem to be better.

They made a choice to somehow say, God can use this, even as horrible as it is, for better in our life. We can actually become more mature, and it sounds like as horrible as this was, you still fought to make sure your marriage and your family became better. Well, and I hope every parent who's listening who may be in the middle of this is hearing what you're saying about pouring into your marriage and about being on the same page and presenting a united front and about making a decision early on in this journey. Look, if we're going to get through this, we've got to get through it together. We're both in a hard spot. Neither of us knows exactly the right thing to do.

We wish we did. And I think part of that journey may involve getting a copy of Craig's book and reading through it together and asking each other what are we going to do in our situation. The book is called The Painful Path of a Prodigal. You can find it in our Family Life Today resource center. Order it from us online at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to order. Again, the book is called The Painful Path of a Prodigal by Craig Svensson. Order from familylifetoday.com online or call 1-800-358-6329.

That's 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word TODAY. You know, these weeks leading up to Thanksgiving and then to Christmas are times when, as families, we can be actively engaged in purposeful, intentional discipleship with our kids. To be talking this week about gratitude and Thanksgiving, looking at Bible verses that deal with that. And then after the Thanksgiving holiday is over, to start pointing them toward the spiritual realities that are front and center in the Christmas season. It's just a great time of year to be focusing with your kids on what really matters during these seasons. Family Life has created a resource that's designed to help moms and dads engage with kids during the Christmas season. Twelve ornaments that can be hung on a Christmas tree. Each ornament depicting a different name or a different title for Jesus.

It's called the Twelve Names of Christmas. We want to make this resource available to Family Life Today listeners who can help support the ministry of Family Life Today with a donation. Your donations make all that we do here at Family Life possible. Every time you donate, what you're doing is helping extend the reach of this ministry so we can reach more people more often with practical biblical help and hope. So if you can make a donation today, go to FamilyLifeToday.com to donate online or call 1-800-FL-TODAY and ask for a set of the Twelve Names of Christmas. We'll send that out to you and you can use that as a resource with your children or your grandchildren during the Christmas season. They'll love it and we think you'll find it enjoyable as well. Now tomorrow we're going to continue hearing from Craig Svensson about the very difficult season in their family's life when their son moved away from his faith and started making destructive choices. I hope you can join us as we continue the conversation. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.