Mar_18_07 Gerber

The suspect, a youth named Jason, had been arrested after allegedly trying to access a bank account that wasn't his. He had been handcuffed and was being escorted by a police officer to a patrol car when he twisted free and made a break for it.

Unfortunately for Jason, he favored the low-slung baggy britches that have been an interesting fashion statement among certain teen and young adult groups for a few years now, and those pants led to more problems for him.

After he wriggled out of the police officer's grasp, he headed west at a run, but at the same time, his pants headed south. His galloping gabardines became slipping slacks and ended up around his ankles, sending Jason tumbling onto the pavement. He then wiggled out of his trousers, got up, and ran toward a nearby mall. There, a 61-year-old grandmother grabbed him in front of J.C. Penney's by his shirt collar and hung on to him until the pursuing police caught up.

Jason's story is similar to many in recent years. Police all over the country say that it is getting easier to catch young, male suspects when in foot pursuit because in many cases, the suspects' pants fall down.

The fad of wearing pants big and low has been around for only a decade or so, but even the Bible has a story that fits into the same genre as the accounts of the boys whose pants fell down while trying to escape. It's one of Jesus' parables: The Prodigal Son.

There was a man who had two sons. The younger of them said to his father, "Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me." So the father divided his property between them. A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and stuffed it into the pockets of his cargo pants. He then traveled to a distant country where the weight in his pockets kept dragging his pants down, and tripping him up, until finally, he was left in just his underwear, with his money all gone.

After trying unsuccessfully in that condition to earn enough to buy food, he was desperately hungry and felt totally abandoned.

Isn't that typical of society even today? - at least the temptations of everyday life ? grabbing for the gusto, we walk away from anyplace where we've been truly loved and which we now want to leave behind? Somehow, it is impossible to leave such a place without the weight of guilt and bad choices filling the pockets of our pants. The farther away we go, the heavier those ill-informed choices become, and the greater the consequences, and soon our drawers droop and drop us before we can make good our escape.

For example: Here's a student, off to college. There, sporting her newfound sophistication and a couple of new concepts she learned in Psych 101, she joins with a few other students in ragging on their parents, discounting them as dinosaurs in their ideas and as dysfunctional in their relationships. Her stories from home provide a few good laughs for her friends, as their stories do for her. The only thing is, later, in the quiet of her room, she feels like she has betrayed something, and she is flooded with shame.

Or here's a man who as a teenager committed himself to follow Jesus, and knew the joy of God's love, but who has since departed God's way. And "departed" is exactly how he feels. He has tried all the rationalizations, but in the end, he cannot shrug off the feeling that he has wandered away from something priceless.

Love, you see, real love, always has a lasting effect. When we turn away from it, the weight of our own stupidity can feel like the weight of the world in our pockets, dragging down the fancy pants in which we are arrayed and exposing us as the misguided fools we've become.

That's why, when we look again at Jesus' parable of the Prodigal Son, we might want to attribute the young man's fall in the distant country to the weight of his arrogance or his immaturity or of his fascination with loose living, any one of which was enough to bring him down.

But what made his journey possible in the first place was the benefit of living with a loving father. It was his father's money he put into his pockets and his father who, with his own heart breaking, loved his son enough to let him go. But that kind of love weighs a lot, and there was no way for the prodigal to get it out of his pockets as he headed out. The weight of his material goods was in his pockets, and pulling him down, but the weight of his fathers love was in his heart, and kept him in touch of reality, especially when he lost everything.

Our Father is calling us back to Him. If you have strayed, if the weight of material things has gotten you down, or if the loss of material things has become too heavy for your pants, look to your heart and let the love of Jesus lift you up.

Eventually, it was the memory of his father's substantial love that gave the prodigal the hope that if he did go back, even now, in his wretched condition, his father might make a place for him in the servant quarters. So he decided to go back and beg his father to take him in.

We can not suppose for a moment that the son returned home and stayed there for the rest of his life. After all, the farm was his father's, and eventually it would belong to his older brother. In time, the former prodigal was going to have to head out and make his own living. So once he got his feet back under him, he no doubt left again, only this time under the right circumstances with no fancy pants weighing him down.

When we run toward God's love, it touches us with incredible joy that far from weighing us down and tripping us up, helps us leave the soul-breaking and spirit-killing loads behind.

Listen to a more recent story with a different twist?.Former Tennis Phenom Now Serves God

Jaeger, Once No. 2 in World, Is a Dominican Nun

By EDDIE PELLS

AP Sports

HESPERUS, Colo. (March 10) - The waist-length pigtails are gone, replaced by a layer of dusty blonde hair so short it doesn't need a brush. Those '80s tennis skirts are history, too. In their place, a black nun's habit belted with a band of white rope that her dogs like to chew.

Dedicated to a Higher Calling

One constant: Sister Andrea Jaeger isn't quite who everyone might think she is.

Even when she was a teenage tennis star - all backhands and braces - she knew she wouldn't last long in that world, though hers was not a typical tale of burnout or overbearing parents. She succumbed to an injury early. When it took her off the court for good, she felt a sense of relief, because it allowed her to pursue her real passion - helping children.

Through all that, she built a profound relationship with God, one that gave her direction at first, then the strength and motivation to navigate the good and bad times that came later.

A few months ago, at age 41, Jaeger became a Dominican nun - the next, but not final, step on a journey hardly anyone could have envisioned in the '80s while she was perfunctorily dispatching women twice her age on the tennis court en route to No. 2 in the world.

"I didn't do anything according to a formula people were used to seeing," said Jaeger, still trim and fit even though she rarely plays tennis anymore.

She told about one of her first visits to see sick kids, after sneaking away from Madison Square Garden where she was playing tennis. She went to the Helen Hayes Hospital, north of Manhattan.

In one room, a girl was rigged up to a huge IV pole and she carried it around pretending it was her dance partner. Another was bald, and Jaeger figured that girl would be jealous when she reached out and felt Jaeger's long pigtails.

"But she gave me a look, like, 'You've gotta wash and dry that?" Sister Andrea said. "At that very moment, I felt like God was saying to me, 'When you grow up, you're going to help kids stuck in the hospital.' At 15, I thought, 'This tennis thing is great, but it's not what I want to do when I grow up."'

Jaeger described her evolution into the sisterhood as a process and a calling, not a sudden decision (like the prodigal son). Becoming a nun meant a change in uniform (she is currently without her veil, because the dogs got hold of it and chewed it up), but didn't alter much in her outlook. She has always had a good relationship with God. She has always worked hard to help others.

Jaeger is a Dominican Anglican nun. She doesn't have to live in a convent and can live what, to others, might be seen as a "normal" life. She did, though, take vows and must live a life devoted to service.

"I think women who are getting older might want to dedicate

their lives and commit to something," Jaeger said. "So, hey, if you always want to know you made the right choice, dedicating your life to God is always going to work. Because he'll lead you to wherever it is."

The place for Sister Andrea is a ranch outside of Durango, Colo., the new home of her life's work - the Little Star Foundation. After she blew out her shoulder in the 1985 French Open at age 19, Jaeger poured the $1.4 million she'd earned, bit by bit, into an effort to help young cancer patients and other disadvantaged children.

Part of the liquidation included selling her Mercedes. As a tribute to her father, Roland - who taught her the game thinking it would allow her to live a life of leisure as an adult - she saved the German license plate from the car and brought it home as a present.

"He was horrified that I'd sold the car," Jaeger said. "I knew he liked the license plate. I thought I was being sensitive. It took him like 10 years to get over that."

It wasn't until years later, when he saw his daughter handing out awards at a ceremony for her kids, that Roland Jaeger came around.

"He said, 'This is my proudest moment. No tennis trophy can compare to this,"' Sister Andrea recalled.

And finally, a father who had seemed more like a coach to this young phenom, understood.

It is almost like he was the prodigal father who came home to the daughter who loved life more than tennis. Do your fancy pants hold you down? Is there something in your life tht allows you to act like the prodigal son, or are you on God's tennis court of life, playing the game of life, being thankful that the Heavenly Father has welcomed you home.? Let us pray???..