My initial thoughts.
I was going to write “at some point as a parent you learn to give your children to God” but of course that’s a Christian idea. Someone without a belief or imagined relationship with God I suppose would simply “release” their children one way or another.
Part of this is simply parenting. Emotionally clinging to our children in the hopes that they will be enduring reflections of our desires is unhelpful to them and unhealthy for us. We have had the privilege to influence them and we’ve certainly done so, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.
Whether our children embrace the “wrong” political party or a lifestyle we find distasteful, immoral or destructive most of us love them still.
Unlike many contemporary instincts that demands that love include acceptance of all one’s choices what love entails is an active regard for the well-being of the other. Anyone who has navigated a long term commitment of love knows that this is always complex often strenuous and even painful. To love is to suffer. To choose to love is to choose to suffer for the sake of the other and the sake of your own integrity.
All of this is set against a media-narrative machine that wishes to insist on simplistic stories and simplistic relationships. “If you love me you will affirm everything I love, affirm and do.”
This is sheer folly. That facile, juvenile idea is the infantile devolution of love where the one who wishes to be loved absorbs and depersonalizes the lover.
For love to be true it must always be free. Free to love for its own reasons or for no reason anyone else knows or sees. It is not premised on the loveliness of the beloved but on the desire of the lover to make the beloved lovely and blessed.
I’m not surprised by this story. It is more common than Huffpo could imagine. Neither is it the end of the story, just one point in the middle of the meeting of two longer stories, that of Tony and Bart. I wish them well and pray that God makes a grander story still that surprises us and brings them delight.
Leadingchurch.com 