In a few weeks Teresa and I will take our firstborn to Arkansas and leave her there to begin her college career at Harding University, and although I know a thousand other sets of parents are doing the same, and that countless millions of others have done it somewhere, it seems a unique experience. Unique in that every parent-child relationship is different, and thus every parting must be so. This means there is a limit to the comfort sympathizing provides, and a limit to the preparation one gains from the advice of others. It is something like the “Drop Zone” at King’s Dominion – no one can really prepare you for it, you just have to close your eyes and hold on tight until it is over -only when it is over the world has changed.
I’ve been looking at a painting by Norman Rockwell which was featured on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, September 25, 1954. It is titled Breaking Home Ties. It shows a fresh faced, expectant young man waiting for the train to take him to college. He has on a new suit. His tie and socks match. He is only slightly hesitant – mostly he is a young man ready to take on the world. He is sitting on the running-board of what seems to be an old Model A truck with two others – his dad and his dog. While he looks eagerly down the tracks for the train, they have their eyes averted. He seems bigger than they are, clearly too big for the nest. They are both trying to hold on – boxing him in, leaning in to him. The Dad is holding the boy’s hat. The collie has rested his head on the boy’s knee. Mother is present in the neatly tied bag lunch the boy cradles in his lap. As usual, Rockwell has captured it all in a single frame and three faces.The boy’s face I know, I remember it. The dog’s I know, it is mine now – the face of not knowing really what is about to happen other than that the world is about to change. That dad’s face, though, that I don’t know yet. But I will. He is a farmer, and he’s dressed for work, and though he is clearly intending to go back to work when the train leaves, that face reveals that his mind won’t be on his work for a long, long time. It is a face bracing for a loss that can not be expressed by a farmer, or even a poet.
God knows that face, the Bible says so. God IS that father in Luke 16, who looks down the road, waiting for the day his son will come home from the far country. His great delight (Isaiah 43.5-7) will be when he says to the North, the South, the East and the West: Bring my sons from afar, and my daughters from the ends of the earth. In fact, children-coming- home is a recurrent theme in Isaiah. Jesus says that the entire death-burial-resurrection event happens so that he can bring us home to the Father’s house “that where I am, there you may be also” (John 14.1-3). God knows that face, but with God things are different. With God, children can come home, and it can be like it was before they left. There is no being too big for God’s nest, no growing out of our need for Him – His provision, His protection, His parenting.
We are Tevye waiting for the train to take Hodel to Siberia, knowing that our only recourse is to “leave it in His hands.”
God has those hands. They are held out to us, always. We can make home ties with Him that need never be altered or broken.