My Dear Friends,
We moved Jeff into his dorm room last weekend at UT and drove home to a house devoid of live-in McQuitty kids for the first time in over thirty years. Ah, parting is such sweet sorrow!
Sweet in that I feel like Alice and I have successfully completed the main phase of our parenting assignment which has been joyful, yes, but also arduous, long, and expensive! (I guess until they're all out of college-two to go-the expensive part continues!)
It's one thing to bring a child into this world, and quite another to stay faithful to whatever it takes to raise that child to be, at least, a non-criminal contributor to the social contract and at best a Christ-following world beater. Alice, we did it! We graduate. Five out of five are good people grown up and making their way in this wide world. Hello empty nest, how sweet it is!
But then there's the sorrow part. You should have seen Alice and me driving back from Austin. She was bawling and so was I, but I hid it way better. Wait! What happened to graduation day, job well done, hello empty next? What happened to kicking up our heels and making merry like a couple of newly wed's?
Oh, it's still there. It's just that seeing your last child out of the house means life has just entered a new season which means saying farewell to a past season that was precious to your soul. We walked into our empty house past the kids' rooms where we used to read their bed time stories and past the kitchen table where we used to say family prayers and past the TV room where we used to hang out with popcorn and old movies and couldn't escape the heavy realization that these great times raising our family are now just memories. We felt like returning to Austin and moving into the dorm ourselves!
But that was just for about a half a second. We realized that sending your first one off to school is hard, but that each succeeding one is easier until you get to the last one which is hard again. But just as we got over saying goodbye to his old brother and sisters, we knew we'd get over saying goodbye to Jeff. We'd acknowledge that a special season of child-rearing in our lives was over, but we'd come to the point of celebrating what we'd understood all along was the purpose of that child-rearing-launching the reared child!
It's amazing how easy it is for us parents to forget that our kids don't belong to us (but to God) and aren't placed on this earth to serve us (but God). Our job is to love them, raise them right and release them to accomplish the tasks that God put them here to accomplish. Letting them go is hard when we forget that letting them go is why we raised them up.
I love the way Psalm 127 (verses 3-5) pictures the parenting task:
Children are a heritage from the LORD,
offspring a reward from him.
Like arrows in the hands of a warrior
are children born in one's youth.
Blessed is the man
whose quiver is full of them.
They will not be put to shame
when they contend with their opponents in court.
Children are like arrows in the hand of a warrior, mighty instruments in this world to defend and protect and resist evil and establish good. But though they may be in a quiver, arrows aren't made to stay there. They're made to be launched from a longbow to go screaming dead into their target much to the delight and joy of the archer. You can't hit the target unless you let fly the arrow.
So my fellow parents, enjoy the quiver time, but hesitate not when release time comes. It's all good. It's all meant to be!
With Regards to Robin Hood,
Pastor Andy
P.S. Oh, and another thing we've learned is that even though you say goodbye to your kids, they generally don't stay gone and do come back for at least a little while. . . so we're keeping the big washing machine and dryer for a good while yet. . .
