C. John Miller - Come Back, Barbara: A Fathers Pursuit of a Prodigal Daughter

WE ARE NOT a family of shouters. We dont raise our voices or even argue much, except in a joking way. And it certainly isnt our style to lose our tempers.

But this day was different. It was late July 1972.The place: Cuernavaca, a lovely paradisal city located on a high plateau about sixty miles south of Mexico City. The setting was a room on the second floor of Chula Vista, the gleaming white main building of the Alpha-Omega center for missionary outreach. It was midmorning. My eighteen-year-old daughter, Barbara, slender and darkly tanned, sat on a low single bed diagonally across from my chair. Near her on another chair was Rose Marie, her mother. Rose Marie is blue-eyed and blond, and at that moment her eyes were blazing.

Mom, Dad, Barbara shouted, I dont want your rules and morals. I dont want to act like a Christian anymore! And Im not going to!

Barb, cried her mother, stop it! Stop it right now! Rose Marie left her chair and shook Barbara by the shoulders. Youre acting crazy! Listen to me! Do you know what youre doing?

At that point I joined in with my own raised voice. It was ineffectual. I felt stupid and embarrassed. Then we all began to weep, Barbara with anger and frustration, and Rose Marie and I out of anger and fear for our daughter.

The source of the tension had been Barbaras insistence that she had a right to personal freedom in her relationships with men. She was not giving an inch and neither were we. The next moment an angry Barbara bolted for the door and slammed it behind her with a defiant bang.

Barbara Catherine, her mother called, come back, come back! The same words were in my own heart and on the tip of my tongue. But we might as well have saved our breath. Barbara was already downstairs, heading for the swimming pool shimmering in the subtropical sunlight. She had won the battle. We were stunned and felt like fools in our powerlessness.

Rose Marie looked pale in spite of her tan, and I was sick at heart. Everything seemed out of control. I felt that I had been the victim of invisible powers, like Oedipus hastening to his doom under the guidance of an iron, unfriendly fate. And I knew that I had somehow unwittingly contributed to my own defeat.

HOW HAD THIS crisis come about?

About a week before our son, Paul, had called us from our home in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, to say that he was deeply concerned about Barbara. Since he was close to Barbara and knew her well, he felt that she had been spending too much time with some of her non-Christian friends and that they were having a harmful influence on her. He urged us to invite Barbara to Cuernavaca immediately. So after a phone call from us, Barbara agreed to fly down.

At first things appeared to stabilize. Juan, one of the fine young men working with Alpha-Omega, escorted her around Cuernavaca, unintentionally acting as her chaperone. But the bottom fell out the evening the three of us attended a Mexican wedding without Juan.

It was a magic night with the scent of a thousand flowers in the air. The fast beat of the mariachi music, the laughter, and the gaily dressed couples brought out Barbaras innermost longings. It quickly became clear that she couldnt wait to ally herself with some non-Christian man. The way she looked, the way she dressed, and the way she walked sent a clear message to the men around her: Barbara was ready to experiment with the world.