Runaways
a Saturday Story
In 1965 I ran away from home. We lived in Aurora, Colorado at the time. We had moved there after a brief stint in nearby Denver. And I had just started school. Our family lived in a modest, brownish brick home with a shallow sloped roof and a reddish brick fireplace out front. 1235 Dallas Street. There was no garage, but there was a carport on the west side of the house with a productive grapevine-covered trellis in the back. The front door wasn’t a front door. Instead, it was on the side of the house underneath the carport.
When you entered the house, you walked into the back end of the living room where mom had placed a large, braided rug over the wood floor. Directly across from the entry door and pushed up against the wall that separated the kitchen from the living room, was the couch where my dad spent the evenings recovering from the day’s labor, often with one of us kids massaging his feet. The small kitchen was next to an even smaller dining room with its round, chrome, and Formica table and vinyl-covered chairs.
On the other side, Dallas Street from our home were large empty lots where we played ball and tag with other children from our neighborhood.
This was our home. There was nothing to dislike. Nothing unhappy about it. It was neither opulent nor extravagant; but we were loved, protected, and cared for there.
From there I ran away. I did so with my first best friend, Dan, who lived next door. We mounted our tricycles and left one morning. We went north, along Dallas Street, past our neighbor, Mr. Barrel’s, house. Past the home where the old man used to hide behind a large oak, waiting to frighten us away because he was annoyed that we regularly drug sticks along his chain-link fence.
We rode until we reached Colfax Avenue, a four-lane thoroughfare whose glory days of mansions and wealth had morphed into a black asphalt and gray concrete strip of bars and seedy motels. Turning left on Colfax, we wandered along that dreary, debauched Avenue, past the dives and strip clubs until we arrived, as if planned, at a pool hall. An old man opened the dirty glass and aluminum door, and we rode in.
Why we were there was, to us, easily justifiable. My sister, Brenda, was scheduled to be in a school program that day. Nothing is more unappealing to two four-year-old boys than sitting through a school program. It was that simple. This was not an act of aggressive rebellion or a protest against an abusive home life. We just decided there had to be something more exciting, more enjoyable, and more satisfying further north, away from home.
A few old men were hanging out in the pool hall. They were scattered about, sitting in the scarred brown wooden chairs lining the walls, playing pool, smoking cigarettes, sipping Coke, and telling stories. Just inside the front door was a cashier’s counter. On the dingy, scratched, glass top sat an old cash register. Inside that counter and behind the glass were a few items for sale. Dan and I pressed our noses against the glass. The man behind the counter said, “Here you go boys,” handing us each our own Hershey bar.
So, there we sat on our trikes in a pool hall, eating chocolate, being teased and adored by the men there. At that moment we neither considered nor cared about what we had done wrong. The worry of our parents or the anger of my siblings didn’t matter. The potential danger in which we placed ourselves never crossed our minds.
And then, a few minutes having passed, and having finished our Hershey bars, the door was opened again, and we were ushered back out onto the sidewalk of Colfax Avenue. We rode out of the pool hall and into the custody of two Aurora police officers. Dan and I were placed in the back of their cruiser. They put our trikes in the trunk and began the drive back to 1235 Dallas Street.
Home.
This wasn’t the first nor the last time I would be a runaway. I wandered away from my Father’s house the moment I took my first gasping breath. I crawled, and walked, and ran down the streets of this world, going nowhere while certain I would end up somewhere. Somewhere better, somewhere more exciting, somewhere more satisfying than home. That is the history of the human race. It is my story. It is your story. It is our story. This is a world of runaways.
Our Father watches and waits for our return, but not passively so. He sends out searchers. They come looking – Parents and preachers, teachers and classmates, neighbors and strangers. They’ve all been runaways too. They came home and they want others to come home with them. So, they come pointing the way.
God comes looking too. He comes as the Holy Spirit, wooing us to the Father’s house. Most importantly, he came as the Son of God, Jesus. And in Christ, God built a bridge out of a cross from this land of lostness to his house. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit – all working to bring his runaway children home.
Relentlessly and persistently, this rescue party keeps searching and calling for runaway children to come home.
Come home.
