Fr. Rafail: "God’s love pursues a person even along inadvisable paths"
God waits for a moment in your life—any moment—for your heart to open and receive a drop of grace, so that you can learn something...
God waits for a moment in your life—any moment—for your heart to open and receive a drop of grace, so that you can learn something; or until by taking poor, incorrect paths you come to understand that they were poor and incorrect, and God will ask you: “Are you sure that this is what you wanted?” like the Prodigal Son who reached the point of feeding swine with what he was not allowed to eat, and I imagine that God spoke secretly in his heart: “Are you sure that this is what you wanted? Are you sure that this is why you asked for an inheritance from your father, to wind up in this state?” And from that moment, the Prodigal Son comes back to himself and repents and returns to his father. So even along inadvisable paths, God’s love pursues a person, because God has a single thought for man, not because He lacks other thoughts, but His thought is salvation, this being because of love, and as I was telling some people just now, God doesn’t have love at all—He is love, and this is much, much more than having it. God is love, the Apostle John says. Thus, the paths of salvation are many.
This is a great reminder and pain-alleviation of the many parents whose "prodigal children" are still to return from the many spirits of the world...