The Family That Left the Porch Light On

In 2014, the Showalter family of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, received the call every parent dreads. Their seventeen-year-old son Marcus had disappeared — walked out after an argument, leaving only a scribbled note that read, "Don't look for me." For eleven months, Jim and Carolyn Showalter kept Marcus's bedroom exactly as he left it. They left the porch light on every single night. Carolyn set his place at the table each Sunday dinner. Neighbors thought it was denial. Friends gently suggested they were torturing themselves. But Jim would say, quietly, "When he comes home, he needs to know we never stopped waiting."

Every evening, Carolyn stood at that front window and whispered the same prayer: "Turn to us. Come back."

Marcus did come home — gaunt, broken, standing on that porch at two in the morning, stunned to find the light still burning.

That is the cry of Psalm 80. Israel stands at the window, pleading with the Shepherd of Israel to shine forth, to restore, to turn His face toward His people once more. "Restore us, O God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved." Three times that refrain rises — not a casual request but a desperate, aching repetition, like Carolyn at the window night after night.

But here is the gospel underneath this psalm: the God who seems silent is also the God who never turned off the porch light. He is the one who set the place at the table before we ever thought to come home.