The Impossible Dream

Being  a parent is easy because you only have be concerned with one thing…everything. 

Honestly, I don’t know of a parent worth their salt that would ever say that parenting is easy, even with the most ideal of children. There are really just too many variables and uncertainties.

Children after all are just people, each one different than the other, and what may be a sufficient answer for one may not do at all for another.

Over the course of time, our children become disillusioned when they come to realize that we are simply people, once as they were, doing our best to make sense of the senseless in this world and do our best for them.   

But who can say what our best looks like at any given time. 

It is something that changes with experience and circumstance.

You know I speak from the grief of my own experience when I say it is difficult to watch the prodigal go.

As with the father in the parable, we anxiously watch and wait, hoping and trusting, but that in the end is all we can do when they seem bent on experiencing the fruit of their own free will. It is sadly the way I too had to learn.

There is a saying about training up a child in the way they should go and that when they are old they will not depart from it. Some translations read that they will return to it. 

You cannot return to a place you never left, and so sometimes allowing someone to make the right decisions also means allowing them to make the wrong ones as well. A freedom God too extends to us, and we often abuse just as children will do with their own parents.

After all, how many times can we tell them the flames will burn them before letting them touch the flames for themselves? 

It’s certainly never easy to watch and the best we can do is not to shame them by saying,” I told you so!” (Because they already know that.) but to let the experience be the teacher, extend forgiveness, bandage their wounds and remind them that we love them.

I have learned a good deal about the God I worship by virtue of my experiences as a Father. I suppose when I say that I have learned them, what I really mean is that what I already knew has as a result moved from mind to my heart for greater understanding and conviction about the depth of their purpose and application to my own life.

These realizations from my own experiences then allow me to pass on (in lesser quantity granted) the unmerited grace, mercy and forgiveness previously unrecognized applied to my own life, as I consider that God must view us as His children (although with greater depth) not unlike we view our own children.

Just as the above mentioned parable is about God and man, I also find comfort that God often refers to himself as a Father. He understands the heartbreak of the wayward child.

We are all prodigals in one sense or another.

In my younger days I often thought about a time when I would not be alive for my children to turn to. This struck great sadness and fear within me because as long as they have been alive, I have been there. 

Certainly life goes on after anyone passes but these are my children and I worried desperately for them.

The depth of my trust in God has always been a reoccurring issue in my life, and once again it came to light when during this time I had a particularly vivid dream.

I had died and found myself before Jesus, without a word I fell to my face and in tears thanked him. It was all i could do. I knew at that moment what he had been telling me all along…

“Dave, these are not your children or your family to worry about. 

They never have been. 

You have provided for them only with what I have provided for you. 

Don’t you trust me when I tell you, I will continue to take care of them, 

just as I have always taken care of you?”

These words echo as clearly today as the night of that dream and it is a dream I dare not forget in times of stress such as these, that both you and I face.

I suppose I really have no advice as much as personal insight, but this much I know…

We do not struggle in vain. There is a plan and a purpose in all of this. 

Understanding it from our vantage point I imagine would be like looking at one piece of a very large puzzle and trying to guess what the picture might look like when it is completed.

Who can say? 

We are the finite grasping, struggling to understand the infinite. 

An impossible task

We are only one piece in the puzzle, but God knows the bigger picture.

So we we anxiously watch and wait, hoping and trusting.

It is in the end, the best we can do…

Solo Cristo Slava.

God's peace be with you, now and always. 

d(-_-)b