Julie Cobello, of Middle Grove, N.Y., works as a staff leader for Young Life in Saratoga Springs. Her heart is drawn to children in need, young people who are especially at odds with the world around them. Yet she recalls that "when our [own] children were born, I remember thinking, I can't do this ... this is too big for me.” As each of the four children came along, the fear of the immense responsibility increased. “But we grew more confident in our ability to rear these children. Over the next few years of diapers and naps and lots of tears and laughter, I grew as they challenged me.”

Rick Cobello travels the world, working as a software product manager for a company in Australia. He also serves as a ruling elder at Ballston Spa, N.Y. (PCA). “Richard, my son,” he remembers. “He was only three years old, watching television in the living room, and he kept turning up the volume. I must have told him 10 times not to touch the volume with his hands, and to leave it alone. Soon, I heard the volume was up all the way. I came back into the room and said to him, ‘I thought I told you not to touch the volume with your hands.’ He said quickly, ‘I didn't touch it, I used my feet.’ We knew we were in for trouble.”

“At four, he went to half-day kindergarten. I took off early from work to meet him off the bus his first day of school. Julie and I watched him come up the driveway, and he was smiling. ‘How did school go today?’ we asked. With a smile he said, ‘I had a great time and I learned everything I need to know. I am not going back tomorrow.’ "

Richard loved to be on the ice, and he was a great hockey goalie, but he didn't listen that well. “I'm a coach, and I always tell goalies, "Stay at the top of the crease and don't move until you have to; they will hit you 99 percent of the time!" So now we're in overtime at a tournament and a kid gets a breakaway with less than 10 seconds on the clock. He comes down and Richard stands at the top of the crease and doesn't move, and the kid hits him. We tied and eventually won the tournament. I asked him as he came off the ice, ‘What did you learn?’ He said in a quiet voice, ‘Don't move.’ One of the few times he listened to me!”

Julie Cobello remembers the years flashing by the way any parent of an adolescent does. It was “fast forward to school and its different struggles. What to send in the lunch, what shows to watch and toys to buy, what are their friends like, and are they doing too much?”

And the painfully familiar pace: “So many little incidental conversations, so much time to love and teach and just be together. But as years go on, the time is less.”

And then the boy who as a kindergartener announced that he had learned everything already, suddenly announces—on Mother’s Day!—that he is indeed leaving home. Young Richard, only 16, leaves “to be with friends that I do not know and to go places I am not aware of,” Julie writes, trying to nail down those fleeting memories. “No fight, he just didn’t want to go by our rules. My confidence is shaken, but my love goes on. Richard has chosen a path I am not sure will get him to where he wants to go, but it is now out of my control. His laughter is far less frequent and his smiles fleeting. And now he is gone, 16 and out on his own.Where? Why? What did I do wrong?”

Within two months, Richard was arrested, inexplicably, for harassing a cousin. He is sent to a year-long program at the Family School.

“Richard was a dreamer,” his father says. “He loved music and had his own media company. He was also accomplished at using computer and programming. He was a smart kid, but he did not graduate from high school.”

On his 18th birthday, Richard returned home, but even after his prodigal journey, he refused to accept his parents’ conditions. He returned to the Family School, but even there the students quickly voted him out.

“He came home one time and I told him if he was going to stay he had to take the GED,” Rick recalls. He took a job at a local grocery store, took the tests, and “when we got his scores back, he had missed only a few questions.” That year, “he developed some of General Electric Company's first Web sites, which were used for many years. He had potential.”

“So many questions and so few answers,” Julie wrote later. “So much fear for his safety but he kept calling, first to let me know that he was okay, next that he was in trouble, then finally that he could come home—once, twice, three times played over. Our hope was renewed each time, our bond stronger, deeper, and the love goes on. ‘Who are you? Who am I?’ we ask.”

“He also had his addictions,” his father says. “He had his struggles. Do you think he woke up every morning and said, ‘Today I am going to be an addict?’ It doesn't happen that way. We loved him for 10 years with all the struggles and with all the addictions. There were many times when he was unlovable.” Several hard-to-fathom returns to the fold were followed by quick departures: “Crashed his car in Connecticut. Came back in tough shape. Went to live with a friend.”

“Stole computer from basement of our home,” Julie recalls in a diary. “Sold it in New York City. Heavily into drugs at this point. Lives wherever he can.”

Young Rick couldn’t hold any position anymore, whether it was a job or a spot in a halfway house. Evicted from homes and shelters, he hit the road to sell jewelry and food at raves and music festivals. He would touch base with his parents occasionally, Julie says, and they would sometimes send a little money.

"I don't know if we can love him any more," Rick and Julie would say each time. “However, we did,” Rick says, “and we stayed with him. He was difficult sometimes, but we always told him he had worth and was valuable in God's eyes.”

On Thanksgiving Day, 2004, Rick came home from Colorado, and Rick and Julie could see that things were not going well.

“After Thanksgiving, the situation got worse. But he did tell us that he visited a church we had told him about—in a three-foot snowstorm. To those who knew Rick, the story was suspect."

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At church that snowy day in Boulder, “Richard told me he had returned to Boulder after a visit home to his parents in the East,” Tree of Life pastor Bledsoe remembers. “Upon returning, there was trouble. Something about a girlfriend who had not come back. He had been locked out of his apartment, his furniture sold, and his cats taken to the Humane Society.

“Now, I’m no Oilcan Harry,” says Bledsoe. “I’ve been around the block as a pastor. It was clear that he was leaving certain things out of his story. As I listened, I began to think that probably drugs and alcohol were involved. But I told my wife, Carla, when we got in the car to go home, ‘Here is a prodigal trying to come home.’ One of our long-time ambitions is to minister to prodigal sons and daughters.

“As I asked him about what he did, he said he had done some high-powered programming as a young man, but recently been down on his luck—he had difficulty holding jobs, for various reasons. His father was an elder in a PCA church in the East, and now, after many years, this young man was trying to turn his life around. He had been away from God for many years, but was now trying to come back.”

Bledsoe remembers that the young prodigal was amiable, engaging, and eager to have lunch with him.

“On Monday, Rick called me and asked if we could meet the next day at the ARC, the Alcohol Recovery Center.” That confirmed what Bledsoe already suspected.

“When he came out [of the Center], he looked awful,” Bledsoe says.

"I want to tell you, I want to be honest," young Rick said. "I am a heroin addict."

“My heart went out to him, and I felt so deeply for him. I listened to him and then prayed for him, and promised him I would be back for him. My prayer felt terribly inadequate. But whatever my inadequacy, I fully intended to be there for him as his pastor. God had sent us this young prodigal, and we would be used in his healing.”

As Bledsoe left, the counselor said it would probably be a good idea if he called before coming in the next time, because when people are going through withdrawal, they often cannot meet with anyone. Richard had another 48 hours of the initial pain and agony. So, the next day Bledsoe called to see if he could come see him. “Well, he's gone, he checked out,” they said. “I could hardly believe it, but it was true.”

This ended Tree of Life’s saga with Richard, Bledsoe thought. “I was very sad,” he says. “That seemed to be the end of it.”

But he wondered what became of this remarkably likeable young man with such a terrible burden. He clearly was looking for the Lord. The Lord clearly had reached out and touched him. He thought of him. And then he got a call from the chaplain at a local hospital. "Rich, what is your denomination?"

“PCA,” I told him.

"Thank God I reached you," he said.

It had been an eventful December for young Richard. He had tried to rob a bank. “It had been in the paper,” Bledsoe says. “It was almost comical. He robbed a bank and then called a taxi for a getaway. Not a very competent bank robber, but in all likelihood, a very engaging one. Probably more like those charming robbers in the Pink Panther movies. Several people in our church had seen the story, but no one made the link,” Bledsoe remembers.

But the hospital chaplain had worse news: Young Richard had just hung himself.

“We were all at a hockey game on New Year’s Eve when we received news that Richard lay near death,” his father recalls. “We were on a plane the next morning to piece together the puzzle of his life. Years of addictions got the better of him, but there was good news from this seemingly bad situation.”

“I went to the hospital and met Rick and Julie, the parents of the charming young prodigal,” says Bledsoe. “I saw Rick, still recognizable, but now so close to death. At church the next day, we wept with them and we prayed for them. It was not possible that we had only known these people for a few hours. The whole church felt it: These were our people, serious and wonderful Christians, parents who had struggled with this child and his waywardness, manic depression, and self-medication for many years. But what grace Rick and Julie displayed! God clearly had worked through this in wonderful ways. The cross had become real to these parents through these years of trial that now culminated here.”

On Monday morning, it was clear that Rick Jr. was gone. He was taken off life support.

“I have no doubt that Rick is with the Lord,” Bledsoe says. “I did get to be his pastor, and his parents’ pastor. Tree of Life Presbyterian Church was truly, albeit briefly, his church. Rick's ‘death nature’ did overwhelm him at the end. But he had already come back to his Father's House—the seed of life was there.

The Rest of the Story

“We held Rick’s hand as he slipped into death,” say his parents. “We thought this was the end of the story, but we had not heard it all yet. The Sunday Rick attended church there was indeed a three-foot snowstorm. Many members of the church did not attend, including the sound man. Someone started the tape for the sermon and forgot to turn it off. There was a time of prayer after the sermon and you could clearly hear Rick asking God to help him because he believed He had great things in store for him. That was the last thing on the tape before it stopped. The motto of this little church in Boulder was "To Find the Lost of Boulder and Bring them Home." Not many small churches get to see their motto worked out in such a graphic manner, but on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, Tree of Life found one of the lost and brought him back home to be with God. Richard died homeless, penniless, carrying around all he owned, but now we rejoice that Rick is with his Heavenly Father, and all is well.”

“Ruth Bell Graham tells the story of a grown child who goes to his mother's deathbed seeking forgiveness for the actions of his youth,” Julie says. “The mother just holds out her hand and says quietly, ‘No need to apologize, for when I was growing you, God was growing me.’”

“How far we've come over the years, but our loves goes on. I'd never dreamed this ending for Richard, although it was not unexpected. But he has given us the best gift, that of the promise we will someday be in heaven together. No parents should feel this pain or have to share in the struggles that Richard had. But life comes with its portion of pain and struggles, and then we have a choice: Which way will we go? I say to you parents and your children: Choose love, choose to have faith. If Rick and I had stopped listening to Richard, we would have missed out on the most wonderful gift a parent can have, which is to know that their child will no longer suffer, be lonely, have to fight addiction and fear, but instead have the promise of eternal rest, peace, and joy. Keep the communication open, no matter how hard it is, know your limits but be ever faithful in your love.”

Nat Belz is the associate editor of byFaith magazine.