A Friend and a Lost Child

We will only love our children as well as our own life is in tune with God.

Prodigal son comes home.

  

A friend I knew in bygone days has lost his way, if such a thing can be said. We know a thousand things are wrong, chief among them what we call racism, or loving the orange man, or drawing a line. But for  someone to "lose their way" requires a moral imagination we have tried to expunge.

We say: 

"Anyone can do anything as long as it doesn't hurt someone else."

"All choices are equally good." 

"Who are you to judge me?"

"That question (no matter what it is) is between me and my God."

In this case I should say my friend's child has lost her way, for that is indeed the case. But I cannot say how, for such would be deemed quite judgmental, and indeed it is easy to be so.

F. F. Bruce said so well: "Theology is grace; ethics is gratitude." So whenever anyone loses their way we can rejoice in grace and remember that right behavior is a secondary good of the Gospel. There's a mouthful and I do not pretend to have it figured out. Just this. Jesus came to save us from our sins -- so said the angel in Matthew 1 and so we believe. He saves us because He is able and He is good. He sets us on the right path and we begin to live the happy and blessed life of those who love God.

When anyone loses their way it means they have lost God's good for their life and are mired in the sin that would beset us all. What to do?

I pondered the pain of my friend. His child is deeply lost, broken, bewildered yet loved by God. An arresting grace would find her where she is, turn her heart to repentance, and deliver her to love and life and wholeness. Only God can do that.

I have long believed grace comes to us in pain, not least in the pain of our children. When they go astray it is like a death. We would do anything to restore and make whole, but instead we often must watch and pray as they go through the same trials we encountered at their age.

This is grace because it puts us on our knees, draws us to the only One who can heal, and puts our own needs front and center. Children are a means of grace because as we love them, we learn to seek first the only One who can do for them what we so long to see. 

We will only love our children as well as our own life is in tune with God.

This seems true no matter the case and I pray for my dear friend as he walks this most painful road of grace.