Chrysostom
Beloved of All
Your cry ascends to the throne of God, where the Father and the Son dwell in perfect, eternal unity. This is no small grief you bear, and the Lord who sees all things knows the ache of a heart longing to be bound again to a beloved child. The love between a father and his son is a living image of that divine bond, and the wound you feel now is a shadow of what our own rebellion inflicts upon the heart of God. Yet He does not cease to call us to Himself. So neither must you cease to call upon Him, and to stretch out your heart toward your son, even when your own strength fails.
Consider that even in the blessed Trinity, the Son says, “All Mine are Thine, and Thine are Mine.” There is no distance, no coldness, no estrangement in the divine nature; yet think what the Son has done to draw us who were far off into that very intimacy. He did not wait for us to return. He came to us, clothed in our weakness, bearing our sorrows. The death of your wife has cast a heavy shadow over your household. Your son, in his grief, has withdrawn, perhaps not from you alone, but from the unbearable pain of remembering, from the vulnerability of needing comfort. He is a child lost in a cloud, and you are the father who must stand at the edge of that cloud, calling and waiting, never retreating.
Do not imagine that your prayers are unheard because the change tarries. The Father reveals the Son, and the Son reveals the Father, and this revelation is often accomplished through patient, enduring love. Your steadfast presence, your unceasing prayer, your refusal to let bitterness take root, these are the means by which the Spirit works. The same Spirit who is the love between the Father and the Son will, in His time, breathe upon your son’s heart and turn it back to you. Strive together with the grace of God in your prayers, as the Apostle says, and cling to this truth: He who suffered to give us the adoption of sons will not despise the groaning of an earthly father. He who allowed a slave to be called His father according to the flesh, in order that He might make the Lord a Father to us slaves, knows how to mend what is broken.
Wait on the Lord with bold expectation. Be for your son what the Father is to us, always ready to receive, slow to anger, abounding in mercy. Let your love be a quiet fire that warms him from a distance until he is able to draw near again. I will pray with you, that the God of all consolation will lift the heaviness from your son’s spirit, that the memories of his mother will one day bring sweetness rather than only pain, and that the two of you will once more be bound together, not only by blood, but by a shared taste of the love that holds Father and Son in eternal embrace. Take courage. The Lord is close to the brokenhearted.
Consider that even in the blessed Trinity, the Son says, “All Mine are Thine, and Thine are Mine.” There is no distance, no coldness, no estrangement in the divine nature; yet think what the Son has done to draw us who were far off into that very intimacy. He did not wait for us to return. He came to us, clothed in our weakness, bearing our sorrows. The death of your wife has cast a heavy shadow over your household. Your son, in his grief, has withdrawn, perhaps not from you alone, but from the unbearable pain of remembering, from the vulnerability of needing comfort. He is a child lost in a cloud, and you are the father who must stand at the edge of that cloud, calling and waiting, never retreating.
Do not imagine that your prayers are unheard because the change tarries. The Father reveals the Son, and the Son reveals the Father, and this revelation is often accomplished through patient, enduring love. Your steadfast presence, your unceasing prayer, your refusal to let bitterness take root, these are the means by which the Spirit works. The same Spirit who is the love between the Father and the Son will, in His time, breathe upon your son’s heart and turn it back to you. Strive together with the grace of God in your prayers, as the Apostle says, and cling to this truth: He who suffered to give us the adoption of sons will not despise the groaning of an earthly father. He who allowed a slave to be called His father according to the flesh, in order that He might make the Lord a Father to us slaves, knows how to mend what is broken.
Wait on the Lord with bold expectation. Be for your son what the Father is to us, always ready to receive, slow to anger, abounding in mercy. Let your love be a quiet fire that warms him from a distance until he is able to draw near again. I will pray with you, that the God of all consolation will lift the heaviness from your son’s spirit, that the memories of his mother will one day bring sweetness rather than only pain, and that the two of you will once more be bound together, not only by blood, but by a shared taste of the love that holds Father and Son in eternal embrace. Take courage. The Lord is close to the brokenhearted.
