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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Scott Mayer

Prodigal Son in Paradise

I praise your name for everything that you have done in my life and everyone's life.

And Lord, thank you so much for the opportunity to come together and worship you and to profess that you are our Lord and Savior.

We titled this talk this morning, The Prodigal Sons of paradise.

We all have a bit of a prodigal son story, but that story actually really touches dear to my heart because as the son that decided to leave home, I grew up in Paradise, California.

We, my father, was more on the conservative side.

In fact, he probably should have been a pastor.

And I was taught to read my Bible from an early age.

My older brother and I, we were very fascinated with making movies when we were little.

My dad had an 8mm and a 16mm film camera when we were little.

And he used to let my brother and I have as much film as we could go out and shoot.

We'd gather all our little neighborhood kids together, and we'd write little stories and have little tree forts.

Never, ever did we ever think that this would be something that we would do for a living, but as we started to get older, we started to become more and more fascinated with this thing called television and movies.

And my dad, from early on, he didn't quite know how to put his finger on the TV, but he said, you know what, I don't want TV in my home.

And so we were actually raised without the ability to watch movies and television, but of course, like any child, goes over to their friend's house and you hear about it from school.

So my brother and I, we were very much so fascinated by this business.

Now, in Paradise, Brandon also was in my class and a good friend of mine growing up.

When we got to high school age, we always talked about, man, wouldn't it be so neat to go down to Hollywood and make it in this movie industry and drive all those fast cars and live the high life.

And we would spend most of our time dreaming about this Hollywood business.

Well, as we started to get older, and we went to Pacific Union College, we decided to take some of the film studies classes there.

We didn't know where this was going to lead or how this was actually going to turn out.

But as we started to take the classes, my spiritual life took a large decline.

And like you can find anything that you want to in college.

You can find the good people, you can find the bad people.

My life became much more interested in this fictitious world of Hollywood.

And what they were pumping out at us was kind of starting to become some of my idols.

Brandon and I, we would skip a lot of our college classes and we'd just rent movies.

I don't know how we actually even made it through school.

But the classes that we took, it was told to us while we were at school that Hollywood is a business that operates on who you know.

It doesn't matter if you graduate with a degree, you are going to start at the bottom no matter what.

So I kind of took a hard look at that and I said, wow, why am I spending so much money to go to school if it doesn't make a difference anyway?

And this is actually what I'd like to do.

So I pulled out of school and ended up in Hollywood.

And within months of going to Hollywood, I decided to stop reading my Bible.

I decided that it was more important to meet friends and to jump into this workforce, into the Hollywood business, which operates 7 days a week.

And maybe by working in the business, I would somehow be able to witness to other people or something.

Within months, I left my faith completely.

I stopped talking to 1 of my best friends, my brother Tom, who also went to Pacific Union College and took the film studies classes with me, who I was very, very close to, ended up moving to Hollywood and very close to the time that I moved down there.

I stopped talking to my brother, and life for me just became more about what I could get for myself.

Bars became a regular thing for me on the weekends.

That sort of became my church, if you will.

I was very, when you're in the whole bar scene, It was very quickly that I got involved in the whole drug world and the whole party lifestyle.

And I feel like the whole time that I was there, God was constantly trying to woo me back.

1 of my best friends, Brandon here, he actually ended up, when he left PUC, he went out to Montana to become an architect, and he would keep in contact with me, and he actually came back into the church at an earlier age.

He would call me up and he would say, Hey, Scott, you know, have you been going to church?

I don't really, you know, I don't really care about church anymore.

And I didn't really want to talk about religion ever.

I just wanted to tell him all about the movies that I had been working on, or things that I had been involved in.

And Brandon here would continue to try to talk to me about God.

As I showed up here this morning and Chelsea was giving the Sabbath school and talking about brotherly love.

Hebrews 13, it says, Let brotherly love continue.

When I think of brotherly love, my brother and I grew up in that kind of brotherly love that we would do absolutely anything for each other.

I also shared that same sort of brotherly love with Brandon.

Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by doing so, some have unwittingly entertained angels.

Remember the prisoners as if they're chained with them, and those who are mistreated, since you yourselves are in the body also.

You see, Brandon had become part of the body of his church.

And here his friend that he had grown up with and had talked about all these things at Pacific Union College and, oh, we want to go to the movies.

And here he had seen his friend go out there.

He had enough love to constantly say, Scott, what about God?

And I constantly put my hand out and said, no, no, I don't want to talk about God.

It wasn't long before I had completely even stopped talking to my brother Tom.

Tom had lived down the street from me basically.

Within minutes I could have gotten to his house And we just never even saw each other, never hung out.

Tom started working in television, and I was trying to get heavily involved in the movie industry.

And Tom asked me, 10 years into my life in Hollywood, he asked me if I would go home to Paradise Adventist Academy to our 10 year high school reunion, his 10 year high school reunion, and he didn't know anybody that was going and he really wanted to go.

I said, you know, Tom, man, it's been a long time since I've been around Adventist people and I've kind of forgotten about this whole thing, church and God, and I know what that's gonna be like.

When we showed up there, it was just as I kind of had suspected.

All my friends' parents were still there, and a lot of the people that I had grown up with, they were there, but they just looked a little bit older.

They had heard, of course, that we had gone down to Hollywood, and all anybody wanted to talk about was Hollywood.

They'd come up to us and they'd say, man, have you met Brad Pitt?

Of course, the last thing that you wanna do when you leave Hollywood is just talk about Hollywood all the time.

So we kind of tried to keep that to a dull roar, and we really wanted to meet with people and pay attention and see where everybody had come and that we had grown up with.

Well, while everybody was bombarding us with Hollywood talk, there was 1 kid that came up to us and he said, you know what, How's your relationship with God?

And we, my brother and I, remember we looked at him and we said, wow, what?

And he said, how is your relationship with Christ?

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Prodigal Son in Paradise

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