Care
Our oldest daughter moved to Georgia this past week. Not the country…the state. Yet, to my heart it feels as if she has moved to the moon. I know that I am not the first person who has had to navigate this chasm between the “new home” and the “no longer home” transition of a child. I have to admit, it is even harder than I expected.
I try and take some encouragement from some of my friends who have children living in California, Montana, Kentucky, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Maryland and Germany. Somehow it seemed easier for them…though I doubt that it was.
There are aspects that help reduce the sting. Such as, face time, Spirit Airlines, unlimited talk and text and the fact that Christmas is only 31 weeks away…yes, I’m counting.
As I ponder, I can only consider one thing that would fully remove the sting…and that is, if I didn’t care. If I could somehow stop caring about her, about seeing her, about being with her or about helping her…then, I think it wouldn’t hurt. But, I think I’d rather have the hurt.
I don’t want to live my life without care. In fact so many things in life hurt. If I could stop caring, then maybe the hurt would go away. But…again…I think I’d rather have the hurt.
My parents stopped by this last week to say goodbye to Hannah as well. It was easy to see that they too were experiencing the pain. It was obvious…they cared. In fact, I watched my dad slip some cash quietly into Hannah’s hand and with tears in his eyes he choked out, “This is a little something for your new place.” I couldn’t help but think during this sweet exchange…”Who are you? You are not the dad I knew growing up! You are not the same person that gave me one penny per piece of wood that I hauled into the house in a form of an IOU.”
Despite my own feelings of injustice, I didn’t miss the beauty of the care that was expressed.
On the day that Hannah drove off, I may or may not have sobbed off and on from 4:30-6:30 am....and battled tears throughout the day…and the next…and the next…and even now.
The lack of action doesn’t necessarily mean that we don’t care, nor does our action guarantee care. However, I am convinced that if we hold to genuine care, action would have no choice but to follow. You could see it in my dad’s actions and you could see it in my tears.
All the more, you can see it in the life of Jesus. Matthew 15:29-39 reveals yet another distribution of the deep care of Jesus to people. In fact, every time we encounter Jesus having compassion on people in the Gospels, he follows it with action. In this case, Jesus once again has compassion on a crowd of people…primarily Greek people, and once again he feeds them, he cares for them. Once again Jesus takes action fueled by his compassion.
May we come to see, that Jesus cares much more than we could ever think or imagine. We don’t always understand the ways of God, but he understands us and he cares for us deeply, longing to spend eternity with each of us.