Next morning, the reporter returned. A young, blond-headed man was asleep, rolled up in a bright yellow blanket. When he finally awoke, he lay there and smoked a cigarette. The reporter asked if he was Russell Love. He said he was.
"Your mother wants you to call her," said the reporter. He gave Russell the ad. Russell rolled up his bedroll and walked off down Western Avenue, the paper with the ad under his arm.
Russell called home on a Friday. His mother told him how much she missed him. They talked three times between Friday and Monday. She said she would send him some money. When she got paid at the end of the month, she would send him some tickets to fly home for Christmas. The money arrived. Russell had to call home to get some identification papers to cash the check.
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"I'm going to see that he gets all the ID necessary to get a job," said his mother. "I'm going to try to make it possible for him to rethink his decision and come back into the world he came from and to make a better decision."
That's what Christmas is really about, isn't it? It's about being contacted from home and given a chance to make some better decisions about our lives. God has reached out to us and said, "I love you, and I'm looking forward to your coming home."
Now it's up to us to respond -- to say, "I'm glad God has got in touch with me, and I do want to go home. I'm going to make some important changes in my life and my thinking, and from now on I'm going to have Him in mind in everything I do. Then I'll really be home for Christmas!"
Russell Love did go home. A follow-up article showed a picture of him and his mother together. It told about all the catching-up the family had done since his return, and about the way they "grabbed each other and hugged and hugged" when he showed up.
"It feels great to be home," the article quoted Love as saying. "It's nice to be a family again after being a traveler."
You can draw your own moral from that.