The younger son told his father, “ I want my share of your estate now before you die.” So his father agreed to divide his wealth between his sons.” Luke 15:12
Intimately aware of the inclination of his son, the father factors in the proclivity and predisposition of waywardness. The father considers the corners and crevices of his son’s life precariously balanced on a cliff of rebellion. One step further and over he falls. The father has all the authority to say yes or no to the son’s demands. He knows what will happen if he says yes. What does the father do? Hang on to the son he loves or let him go chasing after the world? He lets him go.
Sometimes in life, we have to let people go. Release them to choose the journey they want to embark. The father comprehends a fundamental foundation of our make-up: People want a choice. They want the power to choose. To decide if they want to stay or leave. If you love someone, you let them go the road they want if staying isn’t enough. Love isn’t formulated, fixed, or forced. Contained affection becomes constrained and disdained disaffection.
The father lets his son go, completely comprehending the consequences. That he will make disastrous mistakes and deviant missteps. That he will falter, fail, and fall. That he will flounder in fallacy and sink in sin.
But the hope of this father and any parent, is that his child will return. Like the father in this parable, God gives us the choice to leave. But He also gives us the chance to re-evaluate and to reconsider. There’s no road so distant that we can’t come back. No reality so distorted. No response so dysfunctional. No relationship so dead. That our Father God won’t take us back. This is the grace of redemption. The wandering child doesn’t need to worry anymore if he is accepted. The waiting child doesn’t need to wonder any longer if he is approved. We can come to the Father wherever we are, whether far off in a faraway land or simply right there at the homesite.
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©️2020 Jordan Su