[Author’s Note from Emily Ryan: I was thrilled to get to know Emily Craft when we traveled to Israel together for a mission trip. I was even more thrilled when she agreed to let me share her story. If you are currently praying for a “prodigal” – a wayward child, husband, grandchild or friend who is far, far from the Lord, I encourage you to read Emily’s story.  You will be blessed. This article first appeared in the January, 2016 issue of Sagemont Life magazine and has been edited for this blog.]

 

Playing Church

As a child, Emily Craft was a regular at Sagemont Church. The youngest of four children and the daughter of Peggy Craft, a fixture in the church choir, Emily was practically born with a permanent name tag branded for the church nursery as Sundays and Wednesdays at Sagemont were as much a part of her life as scheduled feedings.

By the time Emily was a student, she knew how to play the church game. On one hand, she had discovered the high that resulted from appearing to make public declarations of faith. Every year at church camp, every youth Journey rally, every single altar call that beckoned for life-changing confessions, Emily bolted forward. On the other hand, however, Emily’s heart was far from the embrace of Jesus.

Save for the dramatic pseudo-revival moments, Emily couldn’t even be trusted to remain in church at all. Growing up in more lenient times before the children’s ministry had proper procedures in place to check children into and out of their classrooms, Peggy had to resort to drastic measures just to keep Emily’s Houdini-like escapes at bay after an usher discovered Emily and a teenager enjoying a box of Church’s fried chicken in a secluded stairway when they were supposed to be in a worship service. At times, Peggy had people sit with Emily so she wouldn’t get up and leave, and Emily is convinced that her mom had an entourage of other parents stationed throughout the church just to make sure she remained where she was supposed to be at all times. Emily admits she “wasn’t here for the Bible lessons,” to be sure, and is confident that she knows more hideout spots inside the bowels of Sagemont Church than even the most loyal lifetime member.

In the truest sense, Emily was a prodigal, the type of child who makes a mother’s knees raw from hours and hours of desperate prayer and whose closest friends are trouble, drama and folly. Though she knew of the riches that awaited her within the faith of her family, she preferred the community of swine.

Tragedy Strikes

By high school, Emily’s troubled tendencies grew more serious. No longer was rebellion confined to simply skipping a church service now and then. Instead it evolved into classic teenage anarchy consisting of the wrong crowd and flirting with alcohol and drugs.

That’s when tragedy struck the Craft family, sending Emily further into her downward spiral at dangerous speeds. Emily’s older brother Andrew, only twenty-one at the time, took his own life. While Emily’s other siblings, Jeremy and Amy, were significantly older than she and out of the house soon after Emily was born, Andrew had been closer to her age and the one with whom she’d shared the most childhood memories.

Immediately, Emily shook her fist at God. “Why would you allow something like that to happen?” she demanded. Without a clear answer, she began to deny that God even existed, turn her back on the church and throw herself deeper into drugs, alcohol, the party scene and toxic friendships.

After dropping out of high school her senior year and running away to live with her estranged father for a short time, she quickly realized that wasn’t the answer and was able to find a program that allowed students to work at their own pace to finish school. Only with the help of her older sister, Amy, and by the grace of God did she graduate from Dobie High School in 2006.

If high school was bad, post-high school was even worse, and Emily hit rock bottom when she almost died from a cocaine overdose. However, God used that scare to capture Emily’s attention somewhat and she realized how close she had come to complete self-destruction. Two weeks after that event, in classic impulsive Emily fashion, she joined the Army and immediately shipped out to basic training.

Army Life

Army life had its pros and cons for Emily. The threat of a dishonorable discharge kept her away from drugs, but a twenty-year-old stationed in a foreign country with plenty of money and large blocks of free time can be a dangerous combination for a person in Emily’s mindset. With an extroverted personality that thrives on fun and social stimulation, Emily was easily drawn to the bar scene where many of her fellow soldiers gathered. In her mind, “getting drunk was all there was to do,” she said, so every night brought with it the same befuddled ending.

Soon Emily met and married another American soldier and was stationed at Fort Hood. In the process of getting medically discharged when the Fort Hood mass shooting took place in 2009, she was only a couple of buildings down from where 13 of her fellow soldiers were killed. After she was discharged, her husband deployed to Iraq and their marriage never recovered. It ended with his infidelity and domestic violence that led to his arrest, and they divorced after just a couple years of marriage.

It Feels Like Chaos

With nowhere else to go, Emily landed back in her childhood home with her mother, Peggy. Her destructive lifestyle of smoking, drinking and searching for love continued until a serious relationship ended abruptly, catapulting Emily into a deep depression.

She went numb, packed up her car and started driving north. Once out of Texas, she kept driving all the way to her brother’s home in Colorado where she stayed for the weekend nursing her broken heart. She expected the drive back to Texas to be uneventful, but it was anything but.

The nighttime storm that she found herself in somewhere in the middle of Kansas mirrored the storm that had become her life. Wild. Uncertain. Scary. Perilous. On a whim, she opened the Pandora app on her phone and clicked the first radio station that popped up. It was a Christian contemporary station that she never remembers adding to her favorites, and the first song that played was “Whatever You’re Doing” by Sanctus Real.

The lyrics swept over her like a typhoon. “Whatever you’re doing inside of me / It feels like chaos somehow there’s peace / It’s hard to surrender to what I can’t see / but I’m giving in to something heavenly.”

It was the nudge Emily needed to shrug her shoulders and say, “Maybe I’ll try this praying thing. I used to do this as a kid, so why not!” Once she started praying, she couldn’t stop. The tears and the shaking became so uncontrollable, she had to pull off to the side of the road. “I just can’t do this by myself!” she cried, and that’s when she heard God’s Spirit whisper to her soul, “That’s why you need me.”

What followed was the strangest feeling Emily had ever experienced. All the hurt, anger, pain and suffering she’d tried to drown for the past 26 years began to melt into a beautiful puddle of joy and peace. “I finally reached out and grabbed God’s hand,” she said. “I told him, ‘Okay, this is you. You’re driving now. I’m done.’”

After that, her mom, Peggy, received the phone call she’d been praying for for years. “Mom, I don’t know what’s going on!” Emily said.

Her mother’s voice was that of a parent who had been scanning the horizon for any sign of her wayward child for years. “Well, it’s about time. We’ve been waiting for this.” The prodigal had returned home.

Growing

The following week, Emily immediately experienced the Lord gently molding her newly softened heart. The desire for cigarettes and alcohol vanished, and the magnetism she used to feel towards bars and toxic friendships lost its hold on her. Even the music and television shows she used to enjoy lost their power. Unsure where else to start, Emily spent her first week as a child of God home alone watching her childhood Veggie Tales movies again and again.

In no time at all, Emily got plugged in to the Roots young adult ministry at Sagemont where she heard about the need for female leaders for youth camp. She knew God was prompting her to go, so she signed up right away.

After serving at both junior high and senior high camp, she knew the Lord was planting a calling in her heart to serve in Africa. Still new to the “Christian scene,” she had no idea how to go about it, so she sought out an established missions organization and applied to one of their mission trips. But because her divorce was so recent, the organization’s policy dictated that she could not go until 2017.

“But God’s calling me to go now!” she said, and turned to the Lord in her confusion. “If you told me to do something, why are you shutting it down?” she prayed. Again, she heard the Spirit whisper new truths into her soul. “It’s because you’re trying to do it yourself. Trust me. I’ve got this.”

Emily let go of all planning, and within two days Jerry Squires, Sagemont member and head of Innovative Missions Opportunities, was in Roots doing a presentation on why he needed people to go with him to Ethiopia. She could almost hear God laughing. “See, if you just had waited for me in the first place.”

A New Love

Emily fell in love with missions on her first mission trip to Ethiopia and knew this was going to be her life. “Before I loved Jesus, I always knew I was a humanitarian at heart,” she said. “But God took my humanitarian love for others and my love for him and said, ‘Guess what? That’s called missions!’”

She returned from Ethiopia at the end of January and Jerry asked her to pray about going back in March for a longer assignment. She knew God was leading her to accept the invitation, and he confirmed the call by allowing Emily to raise the $6,000 cost of the trip in only thirty days. “When you trust in God, it happens!” she said.

After her three months in Ethiopia, she had to return home a few weeks shy of completing her assignment due mostly to political unrest in the country. Since she had a little money left over, she was able to join a different Sagemont team on a week-long mission trip to the Dominican Republic.

She used her time back home to meet often with Zach Nicholson who mentored and counseled her to grow in her newfound faith. He helped even further by offering her a position as an intern in the young adult ministry.

She settled into the new position nicely, but didn’t let that keep her from her first love of missions. The fall brought two more trips, one to Israel and another to Peru, leading Emily to the conclusion that if God was calling her to the mission field permanently, it was time to consider pursuing a proper education in ministry.

After much prayer, research and counsel, Emily was thrilled to be accepted into Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary where she will pursue a Bachelors of Science in Biblical Studies with a concentration in Missions this summer.

God Can Do Anything

Emily knows that it’s not typical for a new believer to serve on six different mission trips within the first 18 months of becoming a believer, but she never claims to do things the traditional way. “I always do things a little backwards,” she laughed, but can see now that God led her down an unconventional path to prepare her for the future. “I was new in my faith and had I gone off to college right then, I wouldn’t have made it. I wouldn’t have had this time to ground myself and to grow stronger in my faith. I know I’ve only been a Christian for a little over a year now, but I’ve grown more than that because of the missions trips he’s sent me on.”

Emily knows that though she lacks knowledge of the Bible as a whole, because of what God did in her life and because she has been able to share that so often on missions trips, she knows the gospel and knows it well enough to share it with others.

“Even if you feel like you don’t know enough, you’re never going to know enough,” Emily said. “There’s never going to be a time when you know it all because there’s always going to be more to learn.” But, if God is leading you to serve him on a mission trip, “he will definitely walk you through it and you’ll be just fine because you’re doing his work.”

Her encouragement doesn’t extend just to those considering missions work; she also has a strong word for any parents who find themselves praying for a prodigal child. In a word, “Don’t stop loving them,” she said.

Part of the blessings she has experienced since coming to know the Lord has been discovering just how many people prayed for her during her time of rebellion. In addition to her siblings and her mom, she is also humbly grateful for her grandparents’ godly impact on her life.

“I am a walking testimony that God can literally bring someone out of the deepest, darkest depths of the earth and bring them back to life. Don’t give up on that person. Continue loving them the way God loves them and continue praying for them. It was the unconditional love from my mom and my family and the people who knew me growing up here. I constantly had their prayers and I didn’t even know about them. God can do anything. He’ll make it happen.”

 

How can I help you pray for your prodigal?