Welcome to Mortification of Spin, the casual conversation about things that count with Carl Truman, Todd Pruitt, and Amy Bird.

Mortification of Spin is a weekly podcast from the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

Let's join this week's conversation. Well, welcome to Mortification of Spin.

So glad that you joined us today.

Today is kind of a banner day.

It's one of those special days that we don't get very often on Mortification of Spin.

That I think on a day, well, on a day like this, I feel like the quality kind of takes a step up by several bounds.

And it's because our friend Carl Truman is not able to be with us today.

And that fake English accent of his, I just do not be

fooled by it, folks. But I'm here with, uh, with Amy Bird and we are, we are carless, uh, today.

And, uh, so we're, we're, we're flying without our, our historian friend. Um, but we're, we're talking about a topic that is, because I'm a

pastor and a parent, it's a topic that's near to my heart because it's one that I've seen

lived out in a lot of different contexts and a lot of different families and a lot of different

lives. And it's one that I get a lot of questions

about and one that I think probably most of our listeners have some sort of experience with

either directly or through a friend. And the subject is having a prodigal child, being a Christian

who has a prodigal child, a child who, to use, you know,

the language from Jesus' beloved parable, a child who's gone to the far country. And we,

you know, we want to acknowledge, first of all, that it happens. It happens to Christian families

for a child to, for whatever reason, to wander off.

And it's heartbreaking. It causes a great deal of sadness, oftentimes causes shame, embarrassment on the part of the family.

But it's always a source of pain. And so we want to talk about that today. How to think about

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