The Hardest Story

Michael Bublé has a newer song called Forever Now. Written for one of his children, it is an ode to the new kind of love a parent experiences when meeting their child for the first time. It is sweet and well written, but it’s the music video that reduced me to a sobbing mess.

The video tells a story in still images. No characters appear on screen, but their presence is felt with every frame. It is a child’s room. It begins empty. Some boxes appear, one after another. A ladder. Wallpaper in pastels and cartoon sheep. A crib. Toys. A rocking chair. The crib is changed for a child’s bed. Other things come and go, children’s toys exchanged for sports equipment and computers. The wallpaper changes a few times and eventually settles to white. The bed changes from a child’s bed to an adult bed. Then boxes appear again. One by one, the other things disappear. At last, there is nothing left but an empty room.

Earlier this summer we dropped our twelve-year-old son off at summer camp. When we picked him up, he was thirteen. He is taller than his mom, and while slender, his body is showing all the signs of the man he is becoming.

A few days ago we went to the open house at his school, and I watched him shake hands with his teachers.

He reached forward confidently, shook with a firm grip, leaned into it, looked these adults – most of them shorter than him – in the eye and smiled. It was the behavior of a man. No longer the nervous kid he once was.

Some day, all too soon, that young man is going to move out of my home and make a life apart from me. We will always know each other. We will always love each other. But I have to watch him leave.

I think this is the hardest story in this life. We hold in our arms a tiny person, so fragile and needy, and we feel our hearts bursting to breaking with love and fear and hope and delight. We fight through difficult days of sacrifice and grace and frustration and surprise as we watch them grow. And then one day they shatter our hearts as they walk out the door for the last time as a part of our household.

Something in this echoes our Father’s love. If I am ruined by the thought of my child growing up and moving out, what did the Father feel sending his Son out of Heaven to live and die on this earth?

Yet he did so for the sake of the Kingdom he was establishing. Somehow I need to let my child grow up and go and leave to play his part in the growth of the Kingdom.