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Review of Sarah Walton, The Long Road Home, illustrated by Christina Yang, Wheaton: Crossway, 2024.

Of the seven elders in my last pastorate, three were engineers and one was a scientist. The remaining three were teachers and only one of them, a music teacher, had an artistic bent. If we extend the church-as-a-body metaphor to twenty-first-century Christendom as a whole, then the Reformed-Presbyterian Church might be counted not so much as the brain, but as the left-brain: supposedly the more analytical part of that organ.

We train our pastors in the sciences of language, exegesis, and systematic theology, and it shows. Across recent generations our charismatic brethren have far outstripped us in the creative fields: with film and music production and corporate services that aim overtly to move the emotions.

I know my own shortcomings here. When I preach I’m much more likely to explain a Greek verb than to tell a tale.

How perfect is our LORD’s teaching! He addresses the mind with astonishing logic and reason, and sets our imaginations on fire with jewel-like parables. For example:

‘The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.’

In two sentences I see a prosperous man, riding the waves in his ship. I feel the wind and smell the salt spray. I see him peering from the prow for the next port of call. I see him shuffling quickly through the markets, hungry for pearls. I feel his astonishment and joy when he sets eyes on the one. I watch him liquidate everything – gladly – in order to hold in his hand that pearl of great price. My heart swells with the possibility of a very great treasure, of throwing everything aside in order to have and hold it.

In all, we Reformed-Presbyterian pastors need, for the sake the Gospel, to do so much more to stir up our God-given creativity, to seize not just the minds but the hearts and imaginations of our people. He has built us after all to love great art, poetry, picture-making, story-telling, and song-singing.

This is where books like The Long Road Home are so welcome, a picture-book retelling of the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

First, I note Christina Yang’s very beautiful artwork. The large pictures spreading across every double page are lovely to look at and remarkably detailed. The facial expressions – the resigned sadness of the father watching his son leave, the wretched disillusionment of the son, the innocent impassiveness of the pigs, the son’s haggard amazement at the warm forgiveness of his father – are perfection.

Yang’s colour palate is powerful: the sunny green of the father’s fields, the lurid golds and scarlets of prodigal hedonism, the dark-blue grey of poverty and desolation, the warm rosy orange of the father’s welcome home, and the icy blue of the elder son’s self-righteousness.

Sarah Walton retells the story by naming the two sons Wander and Goodness. Wander decides to ask for his inheritance: “Maybe this was the ticket he needed to leave his home and have the freedom he wanted to find what would make him happy.” Yes, the prose is sometimes a clunky mismatch to the gorgeous flowing artwork.

Walton then portrays Wander’s descent through a series of mythical towns. First, Perfection, where “Everyone hustled and bustled around the town, wonderful and busy”, but with “exhausted faces and empty eyes.” Wander soon grows tired of the fruitless pursuit of the perfect life.

Next, the city of Prosperity with the best of foods, clothes, and gadgets. Wander empties his wallet and buys it all, but “the city left him feeling empty inside.”

Then the city of Popularity, where everyone yearns to stand above the pack in a zero-sum game. Wander is left “feeling lost and unlovable.”

Finally, the city of Desperation, where “everyone looked angry and unhappy.” By now Wander has squandered his wealth and feels he could never face his father: “He didn’t deserve forgiveness, and his father would probably never welcome him back home after what he had done.”

But his father’s final words to him ring in his ears: “Remember that I love you with a never-ending love.”  

So he travels back through the cities of Popularity, Prosperity, and Perfection. We all know the story’s bittersweet end.

This retelling leaves me with mixed feelings. Sarah Walton “fills out” what it means to wander from God our Father, and the fruitless search for happiness in perfection, prosperity, and popularity. She shows us how rejecting God may take different forms. Yet God is the Good Father, ready to give a warm reception to all who turn back to him in repentance and humility.

But I wondered whether Jesus’ perfect story needs such filling out; whether this kind of elaboration dilutes the compact power of the original.

In all, I am glad for this book: it makes us think more carefully about the Parable of the Prodigal Son and how deserting God may take various dazzling or “respectable” shapes and forms. It is geared to ten-to-fourteen-year-olds and could be confidently put in the hands of your children, grandchildren, and Sunday school children.

As a preacher and teacher, reading The Long Road Home makes me want to better engage the imagination of my people – to paint word pictures and to evoke all of the senses, just as the stories and poetry and parables of the Bible do.

This, after all, is the primary purpose of illustration: not to wake up or entertain our congregation, nor merely to concretise the abstract, but to stir up the heart’s emotions to the truth – ultimately to persuade the will through the light of truth and the fire of an appropriate emotional reaction to that truth.

Sarah Walton’s book shows us how to do this a little better.

– Campbell Markham