He never stopped watching the road.
For forty years, Tobiah served in the house of a good man — a master who tore up debts, who left grain in the corners of his fields for the poor, who once looked at a frightened debt-boy and decided he was worth more than what he owed.
So when the younger son demanded his inheritance and rode away, Tobiah was there. He watched the father divide his living without a word of reproach. He watched him walk out to the gate that first empty evening — and every evening after, for years, on the daily, unreasonable, unkillable chance that this would be the night his boy came home.
Told through the eyes of the servant who watched the father watch the road, A Great Way Off opens the most beloved of Jesus’ parables into a full novel — a father whose love runs when running is shame, who floods a ruined son with abundance he could never earn, then leaves his own feast to walk out into the dark after the other son, the dutiful and bitter one, with his hands held open to them both.
It is a story about the heart of God: that grace does not trickle but floods, that no far country can outrun a father’s love, and that the gate was open the whole time.
A stand-alone novel in the Witnesses of Grace series — each book a Scripture retold by a witness who was there.
