Testimony: The prodigal returns
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GORDON UTZ WAS one of those guys who, like me, got into a little trouble in high school. Tall, handsome, hilarious and a good hockey player—I’m talking about me, of course (just kidding!). I’m talking about my classmate, Gord. Recently his brother Stan said, “You gotta talk to Gord; you won’t believe his story.” So, I did. As we spoke, it was like we pushed rewind and were back in grade 10.
Gord Utz at the Missionary Fellowship
Gord Utz was raised by missionary parents who loved Jesus. He believed God was for real, but he just knew he could never measure up to this stern, judgmental God. His parents prayed hard for him. Maybe a Christian high school would pull him from his rut, and that’s where we met. A couple mischievous teenagers with doubts and questions.
After a year of rebelling, Gord was kicked out. He finished high school elsewhere, landed a job and began to party hard, like all his friends. But the life he thought he wanted was hollow, so he enrolled at Prairie Bible College and we were classmates again. After one semester, Gord found himself slip-sliding around the oil patch, living the fast life. “I think I was kicked out of every Bible college in Canada,” he says. “I didn’t fit with Christians, or in the party scene. I didn’t know who I was.”
He soon married Jenny and moved to Winnipeg, intent on climbing the corporate ladder. Before long, he had his own furniture store in the city of Portage la Prairie. There, Gord and Jenny raised a son and two daughters. “I made sure they went to church and Bible camp,” he says. “Maybe they could find what I was searching for.”
But desperation finds us all and, one day, Gord asked God to show up, to do something out of the ordinary. So it was that a local pastor, Glenn Loewen, walked into his store and handed Gord a sermon on tape, “The Father heart of God.”
“The Lord said I should bring this to you,” Glenn said. Gord was stunned. Had God answered his presumptuous request?
But the old patterns continued: work, drink, play—with all the toys a guy could want. At 48, Gord was an alcoholic, locked in an icy marriage teeming with bitterness and resentment. When his wife of 20 years announced she was divorcing him, he got angry. How could she hurt our family like this? he wondered. And why did God even create me? This was all his fault.
One night, while climbing into another bottle, he cried out again for God to show up. An inner voice came on so strong he couldn’t ignore it. Digging out a long-buried Bible, he began to read, but the words seemed meaningless. Still, this voice persisted, so he pulled a devotional off the shelf. And there, in bold letters, was the one word he needed to read: forgiveness.
Ruth Bell Graham had five pieces of advice for dealing with a prodigal:
1. Have a plan. This included encouragement, open communication lines, and letting them know they are always loved and welcome.
2. Put your own walk with God first.
3. Remember that worship and worry cannot coexist, so be anxious for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.
4. Hold onto hope.
5. Miracles are God’s department, she said. Take care of the possible and trust God for the impossible. We cannot convict of sin, create hunger and thirst after God, or convert. These are miracles, and miracles are not in our department.
A voice seemed to say, “If you ask for forgiveness, I will forgive you.” Big, tough Gord began to weep. How could a righteous, holy God offer this arrogant, rebellious, sinful man anything other than judgment? But he prayed, “Forgive me, God.” And for the first time it was real.
Tell someone, he thought. So, he searched the Yellow Pages, randomly picked a church, and found himself speaking to the same pastor who came into his furniture store the last time he asked God to show up. Tears flowed again as they talked and prayed, and Pastor Glenn showed him that there’s nothing we can do to make up for a lifetime to sin and guilt but accept God’s gift of new life and live with gratitude.
One thing still festered. Gord found it impossible to forgive his wife. “As I read the Bible, and got to know Jesus better,” he says, “I saw myself in a new light. For more than 30 years, I did the same thing to God—rejecting and rebelling—yet he offered me forgiveness. I fought for months, battling anger and self-righteousness, until God finally brought me to the place where I could forgive Jenny, and ask her forgiveness for not loving her unconditionally.”
Gord began to pray, not for reconciliation, but that she too would know Jesus. With their daughter planning her marriage, they spent a little time together, and Gord said, “Jenny, if there’s even a glimmer of hope for us to be reunited, I’m all for it.” But she was in a new relationship now and had no interest.
On a fishing trip, Gord and his older brother Stan prayed for each other’s families. Stan insisted on asking God to restore Gord’s marriage. “There’s no hope,” said Gord. But Stan continued to pray. When Gord’s flight landed back in Winnipeg, he rode down the airport escalator, looking for his son, who was there to pick him up. Instead, to his amazement, there stood Jenny with a sign: “There is a glimmer.” He couldn’t believe it.
Soon she told him of the night she tossed and turned, then finally surrendered to God and asked for forgiveness. It was the very same day his brother Stan had been praying for her. Six months later, the two were remarried in the church where people had prayed for two years for this miracle to take place.
Today, God in his mercy has redeemed this family, and Gord and Jenny are enjoying nine grandkids. Gord has taught Sunday school for a dozen years and often speaks at churches or camps.
When you sit in high school, you don’t think it’s possible that God could get ahold of you, or the wild kids seated around you. “It still amazes me,” says Gord, “how God can find and use someone who was lost for so long. From the moment I surrendered my will to him, I have known without a doubt that I’m forgiven and valued as a son.”
